"There are many things that we would throw away...

...if we were not afraid that others might pick them up."
- Oscar Wilde

Okay, so I was musing about forgiveness a while back, but it was completely illogical in practical application, which I realized even then. Saying the words and meaning them are two different things, obviously.

In a way, forgiveness is all about vindiction - it's all about letting go. And I've come to wonder if the act of letting go is something to be achieved, or something that just occurs. Can you make yourself let something go? Can you force yourself to drop a grudge or erase bitterness? Or is it something that just happens, something for which you need to wait? And if it is possible to make yourself let go, how do you go about it? What do you do to make yourself forgive and forget?

I feel like it isn't possible to be able to force yourself to let go of something, be it pain, bitterness, anger, or even love or desire. You can't insist that you forgive someone - if you try, you'll only be saying the words, going through the motions - for all intents and purposes, you'll simply be lying to both yourself and the person seeking or deserving your pardon. And you may honestly know they deserve it: you may be aware that you should be able to let go, forgive, and move on. You may be a bit ashamed that some kind of immaturity is holding you back from letting go. But emotionally, you can't. How do you come to terms with those emotions, let go of the bitterness, drop the grudge, forget what has upset you?

Though, is it really immaturity? What is it, exactly, that stops us from from wanting to forgive? In adults, it certainly seems like it's immaturity. It's exploited for comedy at times - in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Harry can't forgive Harmony for sleeping with his best friend when they were in high school 'cause she'd promised not to, even though that was probably a good 15, 20 years earlier, and he can't stop repeating, "You slept with [him]." It's a really funny sequence, and it makes him seem like he's a teenager trapped in a man's body, who's being really immature. But is that really accurate? Why is that so "immature"? Is it really, or has society just labeled it as immature?

It's difficult: why can't we let go? Do we just have to wait it out? Does it simply vary from person to person - is it easy for some, harder for others? I guess what you're letting go factors into the equation, too. If all you can do is wait for the feeling to pass, wait to want to forgive, what do you do in the mean time? How do you handle what it is you want to let go?


One night several weeks before Daniel had taken her out to dinner and asked for a divorce, she'd woken up and seen that he wasn't in bed. She found him in the living room, in the armchair, looking out at the rain. The wind was shrill against the windows, rocking the trees. Sylvia loved a storm at night. It made everything simple. It made you content just to be dry.

Obviously it was having different effect on Daniel. "Are you happy?" he had asked.

This sounded like the start of a long conversation. Sylvia didn't have on her robe or her slippers. She was cold. She was tired. "Yes," she said, not because she was, but because she wanted to keep things short. And she might be happy. She couldn't think of anything making her unhappy. She hadn't asked herself that question for a very long time.

"I can't always tell," Daniel said.

Sylvia heard this as a criticism. It was a complaint he'd made before--she was too subdued, too reticent. When would she learn to let go? Water poured from the gutters onto the deck. Sylvia could hear a car pass on Fifth Street, the shhh of its tires. "I'm going back to bed," she said.

"You go on," Daniel told her. "I'll be along in a minute."

But he wasn't, and she fell asleep. She had a familiar dream. She was in a foreign city and no one spoke the languages she spoke. She tried to call home, but her cell phone was dead. She put the wrong money in the pay phone, and when she finally got it right, a strange man answered. "Daniel's not here," he told her. "No, I don't know where he went. No I don't know when he'll be back."

In the morning she tried to speak to Daniel, but he was no longer willing. "It was nothing," he said. "I don't know what that was about. Forget it."


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Listening to: Mandy Moore - All Good Things