Blog 6 Should I Forgive Him?

I heard people sometimes said:” I will never forgive him for…”

 I am not interested in the reason why people will not forgive somebody. However, I am more fascinated by the word “forgive” itself, because “never” is such a powerful word to describe “Forgive”.  So, I ask myself: what is forgiveness? 

I remembered that a girl had cheated in an exam in my high school. Unfortunately, after having seen that scene I thought very bad of her and used her as a typical dishonest example in many of my essays. Every time I saw her, in my mind her face was labeled as a dishonest person, and this conception was too difficult to be eliminated.

 After a long time I rethought and asked myself some questions: why can’t I forgive her behavior? Is it so important for me that I should even not forgive her? What if now she has already changed into another person who has known what she did was wrong? So then is there any reason and meaning for me to not forgive here? I find no reason and no meaning in not forgiving her if she has corrected her misbehavior. And so this is it, the inside of forgiveness.

In my opinion, forgiveness is a reaction responding to changes, or in other words, corrections for mistakes. People are quite innocent when they do something wrong but have no idea why and how the thing goes wrong. If a person knows it is wrong just because other people regard it as a wrong behavior, we should not forgive him because he is neither aware of his fault nor does he make any change to correct it. If a person realizes his fault and then sincerely makes changes to correct it, others can say that they forgive him.

Newton discovered the laws of nature after an apple dropping from a tree hit him. Before that unique moment, I think Newton even did not have any perception what gravity is. Edison failed more than one thousand times in the exploration of finding the exact material to make a bulb, he just kept trying. The only thing he knew was that he was only a child in front of sea of truth, and the only way he could grow up was through making mistakes and learning from them.

These examples reveal how ignorant people are when they face the unknown and indicated how they responded to it. Actually, we are all as ignorant and helpless as young little children when we are exploring in our lives. When little children do something wrong, people can easily forgive children’s fault without hesitation. So it is the same in the case when adults do something wrong. For unknown, adults are equally ignorant as children, because they even have no concept of what they have never experienced. Adults are on the same way with children to make mistakes. The difference is just distinguished by people's ages, but how old they are cannot represent how far they have gone to understand the routine in our society. Both children and adults can only learn by making mistakes, or the mistakes made by human’s ancestors. 

Some people may argue that those who do great damage to someone or to the society cannot be forgiven forever. No, it is not true. The one who does so can be forgiven if he has learned his mistake, but this does not imply that he can get rid of punishment. It is laws that ensure the whole society to keep in order. Besides, our morality also plays an essential role. And forgiveness is a part of it. Learn to forgive is an art. People should leave room for others to make corrections. People will never expect worse from a person when they are really considering the situation, because it is not human nature. So therein our history exists people’s imagination of Utopia; all human expect peace and love from the bottom of their hearts, rather than negative emotions . Forgiveness gives us the chance to expect better for others. It is a positive and magic power that helps create a better world. 

The next time when you want to say, “I will never forgive someone”, please tell yourself: forgiveness is beautiful, I am doing something brilliantly good to someone, and I am creating a better world!