Forgive

Flipping through the pages of one of my ever green favourites "Tuesdays with Morrie", I came across "learn to forgive yourself" phrase. Right away, like lightning it struck me. All this while, knowing that there is a need to forgive, I was rather distracted by burdens of unaccomplished tasks. In this world plagued by the urge to first the rat race (though we sadly are humans and not rats), we forget that there is a need to forgive. Forgiving is generally taken as forgiving 'others' who usually happen to be people we 'loved' before the forgive them phase comes. We hardly forgive others ( big egos we carry) so even thinking of that 'forgiving' is not the perspective on my mind right now.

There is also a need to forgive ourselves for the little and  the big things in life. We need to breath more and to sit back and look out the window. Day in and day out, all we do is run from one errand to another, from one task at the office to another. With some kind of an invisible time bomb attached with us, we are on the run, from the ghosts of our minds. We want to accomplish so much. We want to defeat time. Contrary to all our big plans and future goals and our larger than life ambitions we fail. We fail to forgive ourselves for the opportunities lost, for the race not won, for the money we didnt invest in some clever deal.Then we sit and lament and whine over things we failed to achieve and how this has made us useless in the market of the fastest rat in the global picture. We pile on the regrets and in our wonderful imaginations make the 'regret lists' and find bitter sweet pleasure in recalling them time and again. But as Morrie says in the book:

"We...need to forgive ourselves...For all the things we didn't do. All the things we should have done. You can't get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened."

Instead of worrying just too much, wouldnt it be more human to take a deep breath, to take a break from the robotic life, to revel into the simple pleasure of staring out the window clean of all regrets and imagined losses. It should also sometimes feel good to be just glad to be living, to be exploring little things in our everyday life. Like discovering that the cake in  the oven is fluffy and perfect from one end only but that it tastes better than professional cakes, waking up to the sound of rain though you missed a lucrative opportunity at a renowned magazine and or simply sitting next to your loved ones, feeling good, secretly knowing that you could have traveled across borders to study at some internationally acclaimed university but you didnt.

We let others pass by us but we dont forgive them but we could help and forgive ourselves before we die...this might make us learn that forgiving others is not that difficult after all.