Ever eager to improve our Puritanical selves, Americans focus a lot of the time on identifying and divulging ways in which we are badly constructed, psychologically speaking.
Why not occasionally take note of something you’re naturally pretty awesome at, and celebrate that, for a moment?
You know what I’m about as good at as anybody I know? Forgiving and forgetting.
Why?
Not because I have some saintly powers of forgiveness. In fact, I don’t have any idea how to forgive someone for a thing. Or how not to, actually. Forgiveness is a weird concept, for an agnostic, I think.
Actually, I think forgiveness is a hard concept for a lot of people, who you hear often say, “I forgive, but I don’t forget.” How does that work? Ah, Johnny, I remember when I caught ya foolin’ with my wife in the back seat of my car. You were so drunk ya thought you were me!
For whatever reason, I find I’m the opposite: I don’t forgive, but I do forget! Especially, if you apologize.
You say you’re sorry, and I say, “Ah, forget it.”
Then, I forget it!
And between forgiving and forgetting, forgetting is the more reliable action, it seems to me—the more complete. I mean, if I had a choice between having you forgive me for chopping down the house that that you had been saving to live in next summer, or forgetting I’d ever done it in the first place—I think I’d go with forgetting!
In any event, I’m a big forgetter. You can trounce my big toe personally or professionally on Tuesday and get a noisy earful from me for it—and by the next Thursday, I’ll be sitting there in my stocking feet without giving your steel-toed boots so much as a wary look. You can hit me with the jab, say you’re sorry and catch me with a straight right hand. You can rob me on cash, then rob me on credit.
In fact, I estimate that you can trespass against me about a half-dozen times before the offenses begin building up in my brain stem, and giving me an uneasy feeling when you come around.
And I reckon that if you take advantage of my forgetting that many times, you probably weren’t worthy of my forgiving, in the first place.
Not long ago I blocked a friend on Facebook when he picked a fight with me online. I suddenly realized he’d been picking fights with me for thirty years, and usually apologizing. This time, I cut him off before he could apologize, and make me forget again!
(This an actual photograph of my soul, as I was forgetting that stunt you pulled on me last Christmas, what was that again?)
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