About a month ago, I had coffee with a good friend of mine in from out of town. Sometime during our conversation, she mentioned to me that she didn’t think she was a very forgiving person. This struck me as surprising given that she’s one of the kindest people I know but it also made me start wondering about whether or not I was a very forgiving person.

I think that at first thought, I would say that I am perhaps an overly forgiving person but, when I truly take the time to properly reflect on it, I think that my sense of forgiveness has also gotten me in a lot of trouble. Given my nature to take a very extreme approach to life, this often applied to my laws of forgiveness as well. More often than not, the moment that I forgave someone, I assumed that it also meant giving them permission to repeat the same behaviour over and over again.

For all the forgiveness that I had in my heart though, I always found it really difficult to forgive people who didn’t ask for it and even harder to forgive someone who didn’t think that they needed forgiveness in the first place. This concept of forgiveness long eluded me.

I’ve been thinking about this a bit more lately as I begin to notice some of the visitors that have been coming by this site as of late. Some of the pieces are starting to fall into places and people that I thought were long left behind, have been very present in my life in ways that I hadn’t known. I’m not yet sure how I feel about this…

Forgiveness is essentially just a means of letting go. You end up bestowing freedom on yourself and/or another person so that you can walk peacefully through this life without being held hostage to the ghosts of your past hurts. There is a catch though…having forgiveness doesn’t mean that you have to have amnesia as well!!

I’m only now starting to learn that I can forgive someone without allowing myself to make the same mistakes twice. I really think that humility is one of the greatest qualities a person can have and the ability to say that you are sorry falls directly within the jurisdiction of humility. Something that I’ve learned though over the last eighteen months is that, in the same way some people simply don’t know how to say “I love you”…some people also don’t know how to say “I’m sorry”.

So what happens when people that once hurt you during your “all or nothing” days suddenly show up in your new and more forgiving cyberspace??

Is peeking into your life after years of having fallen out of it someone’s way of saying “I’m sorry” or is it just my way making the same mistake all over again??