July 19, 2005

• On Forgiveness
  
  You go to enough 12-step meetings, you eventually hear a lot of the same stuff over and over again.  You know that one guy will talk about how he still craves dope, and another guy will talk about his unevolved, Piscean Age higher power, and so forth.  Kathy and I call these canned statements “tapes”–not that they are necessarily insincere, but that sometimes they sound a tad rehearsed.  One of my favorite tapes to play is about how, for me, abstaining from dope is the easy part of recovery.  After all, I say, I’m lazy, abstaining basically means doing nothing, and doing nothing comes easy to me.  This usually gets a laugh, even though it isn’t really true.  Doing nothing isn’t easy for me; I am happiest when I am working a 14-hour day gun show, schmoozing with fellow arms merchants, making deals on guns, and selling tons of knives.  I am unhappiest when I have periods of enforced idleness, such as when it rains and I can’t open up my stand.  But I digress.
    What I meant to go on to say is that for me, forgiveness is that hardest part of recovery.  I have a long memory for some things–you do me well and I will  not rest until I have paid you back somehow–you do me wrong, and I bear malice towards you pretty much  for life, and will not be content until I have fucked you up back one way or another.
    Anyway, the other night  my brain was on overtime–thoughts just kept rushing in, and I would have blogged my little head off if I had had computer access.  But one thing I thought about was this forgiveness thing, and I just may have  made some progress on that score.
    I was thnking about how my god does not forgive, because he/she/it/them has no need to forgive–that is, my god can be neither offended nor harmed by anything we puny primates say or do, so there is never anything to forgive.  Then I thought about how godlike we are–or at least can be, if we so choose.  I remembered wht Jesus said ( I am a tad uncomfortable quoting the Bible, since so much of it is BS, but now and then there are a some pearls among the persiflage), something along the lines of “Anything I can do, you can do better.”  Okay, I am being less than accurate–it was more like “All those things I have done, so ye can do also, and more.”  Something like that anyway.
    From there I progressed to the notion that we–all of us–can not really be hurt.  Sure, we can kill each other, diss each other, inflict physical pain on each other, ad infinitum–but the essential part of each of us, the soul,  is immortal and inviolate.  At the deepest and most essential level, none of us can really be harmed.
    From there, I thought about all the injuries I inflicted on myself and others, all the things I could not forgive myself for.   I have no right to speak for others and the indignities and injuries I inflicted on them, but I still have some physical pain and disability from drug-related mishaps I perpetrated on myself many years ago.  I used to spend a lot of time kicking myself about it.  Now I am more like, “No harm no foul, big deal.  My soul is still here, intact and immortal as ever, so no real harm was done.”
    What I attained with that epiphany was not so much forgiveness, as the transcendence of the need to forgive. Right now as of this moment, there is no one on earth I really want to kill, or even maim–and that, for me, is a huge step forward.
  

  • 2:19 pm
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