Memories are a good thing. My wish is that every living person has the kind of memories they can fondly recall with a smile. It doesn't always work that way, I realize, but that is what my wish would be if there was a Jeanie in a bottle.
I have so many memories that make me smile. Not all of them do, mind you, but when I look back over my life, I mostly look at the ones that do.
I recently reconnected with a friend from high school. She had asked what I had been up to these past 25 years, and so I sat down and wrote a loooonnnggg letter detailing most of the past 25 years. She commented that I had faced much diversity and had survived with much resilience, strength, and forgiveness. I guess I hadn't thought of it that way. But now that she's mentioned it, I guess I have. I didn't know it showed through my writing, but I guess it does.
And then I began to think about how I was resilient and strong and how forgiveness did play a huge role in my life. How forgiveness still plays a huge roll.
You see, I believe that to forgive is divine. If you don't forgive them, they will hurt you in a way even they didn't anticipate. If you want them to let go of their hold on you, you have to forgive them. Whether you say it to their face or not is not important. What is important is the act of forgiveness itself. It's you letting go of the hurt and the wrong that was done to you.
There is enough negativity in this world as it is. You don't need to carry it around with you every day to add to it. You need to be able to survive this place until it's time to go home. In order to survive, you have to surround yourself with light and positive thoughts. You can't do that if you are harboring ill will or bad thoughts towards another person. The only person anger hurts is the person holding onto it. I believe this with all of my being.
So now when I look at the bad memories, the ones that don't make me smile, I find I use them as a learning tool. What did I learn that day? How can I use that to make myself a better person? How can I learn from their mistakes?
What really makes me laugh is when I bring up to my Mom some of the things she did to me that could be conceived as being bad. Like the time she caught me going through her purse looking for candy and thought I had taken some of her diet pills, so she made me drink mustard water then stuck her finger down my throat until I threw up. Whenever I bring up that for a long time I didn't like mustard because of that, she first denies that it ever happened, and then she becomes very defensive. "Why do you only remember the bad stuff?" she asks me in an angry voice. The truth is, I don't remember only the bad stuff. I remember good times, too. But I learn more from the bad times.
And, if I were to be perfectly honest, it's more fun to watch her squirm.
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