No, I don’t look back in anger, do you?
A lyric from the new Djo song ‘Fly.’ I’ve been listening on repeat to the album all week, sullenly walking the streets of New York, trying to pretend I’m still cool even as there’s tears quietly sliding down my face.
The ability to not look back in anger took me a long time to acquire. It’s a lot easier to be angry about a situation than it is to be sad or accepting or forgiving. To feel any of those emotions would be to acknowledge our role in what transpired, take responsibility for our actions, and actively seek to be better in the future. All things, I have come to learn, that are incredibly difficult for most of us to do. Participating in a cycle of forgiveness, both to ourselves and others, forces us to shift our perspective, alter our behavior, and change for the better. But change is scary, and more people than we think choose to stay angry to protect themselves.
There’s also an element of justice-serving in staying angry. For a while, I thought I needed to stay angry at those who had ‘wronged’ me because they didn’t ‘deserve’ my forgiveness. But anger eats away at your insides like a parasite, makes you bitter and resentful of the people around you who bring light instead of darkness. When I first allowed myself to begin to forgive, it wasn’t an act of compassion for those I forgave, but for myself, so I could live freely outside the boundaries of the all-consuming anger.
Over time, as I chose forgiveness over and over again, my perspective shifted. The dreaded change occurred. Instead of practicing forgiveness for my own interests, I found myself more understanding of the people who hurt me, more willing to extend empathy, more readily able to quickly move past my own anger and forgive. I slowly began to realize that other people’s actions weren’t about me. They were about their own feelings of inadequacy or insecurity or fear- I was just the unlucky recipient of their unhealthy choices.
A lot of my own anger, as a teenager and into my early 20s, came from an idea that people and their actions were either good or bad. They either followed the rules and acted courteously and brought appetizers to dinner, or they were mean to women and actively hurt others and didn’t know how to behave in society. I felt like I spent so much time learning the ‘rules’ and abiding by them religiously that I became enraged when I encountered people who felt these made-up ‘rules’ didn’t apply to them.
The reality is that humans are nuanced, multi-faceted creatures. When we act, there is usually a complex context behind the ‘why’ of each choice we make, and the unique life experience of each of us contributes to whether the chosen action helps or hurts others. In most (not all!) circumstances, the people who hurt us are trying their best with the skills and models they were provided. Just like when we hurt others, we are often just trying our best with the skills and models we were provided.
The people in my life who have hurt me are not good or bad. They are just people living life for the first time, trying to adapt to a world that’s rapidly becoming unfamiliar even to the people that are living within it. For both myself and for them, letting go of my anger and choosing to forgive and move on is the best way to live. Even if we never see each other again. Even if we never speak again. Even if that reality is more devastating than I care to admit.
Inevitably, when the anger does flare up, because I am a human, and emotions are part of life, I let it take over my body for 90 seconds and then, slowly, release it from within. I have to let it out, in a deep breath, or a long sigh, or in extreme cases, perhaps a small scream. Trapping the anger inside would only cause it to replenish itself ten times over. Once it’s released, a wave of calm spreads through me, and I relish the peace that choosing forgiveness brings.
Forgiveness has not been an easy skill for me to learn, but over time, it has re-framed my perspective, shifted my thinking, and made me a better person in the context of the life I want to be living. This essay isn’t meant to be a call to action on the path toward enlightenment. It’s simply a reflection of choices I’ve made in my life that have allowed me to live in a way that feels more closely aligned to my personal goals.
I don’t look back in anger because I don’t deserve that, nor do the people who hurt me in this life. We are all just humans trying our best with the skills and resources that we have, and in choosing compassion, we open ourselves up to the ability to learn and grow beyond our current reality.
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