People suck.
Thankfully, not all of them.
They hurt us, and some hurt us a lot. Some, are so unbelievably brazen, that they simply don’t give a shit.
As time passes, our wounds heal, but our minds refuse to forget. Our scars become refugees and are forcibly moved from our conscious mind, and buried somewhere deep inside our unconscious existence.
The pain we once experienced is long gone, yet we carry those feelings and our woundedness, for many years, and for some of us, years turn to decades.
We don’t let go, because letting go means losing. We cannot lose! We reason that when we got hurt, not only did the sonofabitch got away with it, if we find the courage to forgive them or worse, simply let go, justice won’t be served, and they will hurt us all over again. The idea of their second triumph taunts us, and justifies our anger and watchfulness.
We are so wrong.
We are right about some things. We are right about being hurt. We are certainly right that they are, and continue to be an unpleasant sonofabitch. Some people never change.
But we are wrong, about justice, and our understanding of what this is doing to us.
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of hate is apathy. (Thank goodness for a handy thesaurus).
Indifference.
Apathy.
Letting go.
If we wish to be happy. We need to let go.
We need to learn, at some point, what they already know, the art of not giving a shit.
Having faith in God helps, because justice will always triumph.
More importantly however, it is not even about justice. It’s not about revenge. About being right or being wrong. This whole ugly mess concerns our happiness.
If we don’t let go, we will never be truly happy. We cannot serve two masters. We cannot grow things in a weedy, uncultivated soil.
Letting go does not mean accepting defeat. It simply means that we are determined to refocus our attention on something else; on someone else. When you stop looking at your cat, they do not disappear. They continue to exist. When you stop thinking about an asshole, they continue to live out their asshole ways, but you are free to be who you want to be. You don’t have to stare at cats or assholes.
We have a choice to make today.
We can live in the past, or let go.
If we let go, we have a chance to see a sunrise, and steal some of our wasted time.