If I tell you to forgive those who hurt you, you will probably say, "I'm not a god to forgive everyone" or "I'm selfish enough to not forgive someone who has hurt me". And that won't surprise me. That's how most of us think. We believe that only saints can practically forgive someone who hurt them because they are selfless and kind enough to do so. What if I tell you that it will be even easier for you to forgive someone if you become really selfish?
Yes, you read that right. You don't need to be an extremely compassionate and generous person to practice forgiveness. It's actually the opposite. You should learn to be more selfish to be able to forgive anyone. The more you are able to think about your own happiness, the more you'll be able to forgive those who have hurt you in some point of your life.
I happened to watch a video about Emily Nash, an 18-year-old girl who had HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory). HSAM is a rare condition in which a person remembers an abnormally large number of personal life experiences with accurate detail. Apparently, only around 100 people in the entire world have this rare condition. And if you ask them what they ate for breakfast on a specific day of a specific year, they can tell you what they had with accurate details. So, basically, while we struggle to remember important pieces of information, people with HSAM struggle to forget things and events they don't want to remember. Anyways, Emily happens to talk on a video call with 29-year-old Markie Pasternak, another person with HSAM. While talking about mental health, Markie says to Emily, “Everyone gets hurt by other people at some point because we're all human. And most people, again, they have their forgetfulness to kind of ease that and move on. We don't have that. And so we have to rely so hard on the virtue of forgiveness and recognizing that people are human and they make mistakes.” So, she tries to emphasize the fact that if you can't forget, you need to cultivate forgiveness.
Coming back to the point, though most of us don't have HSAM, we tend to clearly remember the unpleasant moments, because of which we keep suffering. And despite the fact that we want to think about our own happiness, we end up torturing ourselves by not forgiving someone. Forgiveness doesn't need you to be spiritually awakened or generously compassionate. You just need to be selfish enough. Once you forgive and move on, you start giving importance to yourself. You stop thinking what you could have done or what that person might be doing. You stop giving importance to that person. And now, your mind is free of grudges, anger or bitterness. You feel lighter, healthier and much better. Since you are selfish enough to completely ignore that person, you are able to practice forgiveness with no effort.
So, next time you happen to think that you can't forgive someone, try to be more selfish.
