Forgiveness. It’s the only way to settle your soul.

Thing is, it can be the hardest thing in the world to forgive. Everything inside of you wants to hold onto being right instead of just letting the past go and allowing yourself to step into the future. It’s easy to focus on how much you are hurting. It’s almost painfully difficult to let it all go and pick your head up.

Take the punch like a champion. Get your butt knocked down and get right back up and move forward. I say this easily…but I know it’s not that easy. The past does come back up. It stays with you like an unwelcome guest. You have to be cordial with it because “hey it’s my past.” However I can to the realization a short time ago that you can draw your line with the negative emotions that try to sneak up on you and decide that you are going to be more productive with your life instead of complaining and moaning about how much the old stuff happened to suck.

Forgive.

Forgive yourself. Forgive others. Open your heart and your mind back up to the possibilities of today and start moving forward from the past. There is nothing you can do anymore. You can’t erase it. You can’t delete the people out of your life. No…you can only move forward. The only time you can ever live is now.

The energy you put out into the world ends up coming back to you in one way or another. Karma, many call it, is a existent and present force in my life. It whispers in my ear, “I saw that” and I course correct. I know it’s going to come back and bite me in the butt if I don’t change the way I am acting or apologize for what I have done. A lot of the time it seems like there is a battle going on inside where one side tells me just to forget about it and the other urges me on to correct my wrongs. In the end, I pretty much always listen to the voice telling me to take the better path.

Developing ice and hate in your heart will destroy you from within. It will crumble you down to your foundation and then go to work on that if you don’t end up trying to stop it. It will destroy friendships, your will, and your life every single opportunity it can. Your shell will remain…but you will be a hollow version of yourself in the end. Numb. Passionless. Angry.

The only way to combat a cold heart is to forgive yourself and others.

Things will start to warm up after that…but you have to do the hard work first. The best news I ever received years ago was actually the worst news. That I was in a very bad place and I had a significant amount of work to do. The only way to go was up. So I did. Blew up those balloons, attached them to my house, and floated up into the sky.

If you haven’t noticed, today is all about forgiveness. One of the only ways you can move away from the old and into the new is through this route. It brought me out of hell. It has taken me beyond where I could have possibly been without it. And in the end, we can do amazing things with being able to open our hearts to people who have taken a swing at them before.

Life, emotions, thoughts, and actions in this world are very complicated. If you believe that it is black and white, well, then you are living in a world absent of color. Life is colorful. A massive amount of our life lies in the middle ground. People make mistakes. Very very good people make mistakes. It’s your job, if you are trying to make people feel loved, to forgive them.

Which path will you take?

Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project