Less than a year ago, Brenda and I started up a new business. Things are going well — we’re seeing a lot of positive signs that confirm the risk we’ve taken.
While I was setting up my office, I retrieved an old filing cabinet that I haven’t touched in years. It was in the basement functioning more like a table than a filing cabinet. This happens with most things in our basement that have a flat top.
After I dollied it over to the space where I needed it, I opened the drawers and saw folders that brought back a lot of memories. Some of them were good. Some of them not so good. I realized, as I started to empty out folders, that I had been saving a lot of stuff that were reminders of people I felt had wronged me. The folders contained email correspondence, hand written letters, and notes — it was a treasure trove of multiple lines of defense I would need to secure a win if I was ever questioned on bitterness and grudges from my past. To be honest, I had forgotten about most of them. But when I saw the contents of the folders the feelings came back. And when the feelings came back I remembered how I had made the decision to save each one of them the last time I rummaged through that filing cabinet only a few years before. I made the choice to keep each piece of paper because I wanted to make sure I could vindicate myself if I was ever challenged on why my view of these people was a skeptical one. The choice in those moments was an intentional one. I didn’t want to let go. Some of the infractions against me were more than a decade in the past, but my judgment of that person was still present day.
As I sat looking at the pile in front of me something changed inside of me. The thought began somewhere deep in my soul, and I said to myself, “I don’t want to live like this anymore. I want to live in peace. I want freedom from this heaviness.” I began to throw away every document I had kept to defend myself in any way. I threw a lot of paper that day into a large plastic bag to be burned. The truth is that I threw away more than paper — I threw away hardness and bitterness. I threw away grudges and the need to defend myself. It wasn’t easy, but it freed my soul.
My wife, Brenda, has always been my inspiration when it comes to forgetting things. She has a way of interacting with people that desires so much to honor the other person that she makes conscious choices to overlook most any infraction that occurs. Don’t get me wrong, she’s not immune to being hurt. She can still be upset with someone for something they said or did that caused her pain, but she deals with it quickly because she doesn’t want anything in the way of the relationship she has with them. She might try to talk it out, ignore it, or just let time erase the hard feelings. But whatever method she uses, it’s relatively quick because of her intent to live peaceably with others. And, once she’s forgiven whatever took place, she forgets it. Seriously, she forgets it. There are times when I’ll bring up something someone said or did that was hurtful, and she’ll look at me with an inquisitive look and say, “I don’t remember that.” Which blows my mind because I can probably tell you the color of their shirt and which direction the sun was hitting them when they said it (assuming the sun wasn’t causing them to melt due to their evilness.) But not her. We used to joke about this a lot. I used to say it was due to a bad short-term memory. Then I would make up a story of how I took her on vacation to Paris, sparing no detail, as I tried to convince her my false tale was true and she had merely forgotten about it. She would laugh and tell me to shut up.
It’s not that she hasn’t ever had bad stuff happen. She’s gone through some major junk — a child of divorce, deaths of friends and family, betrayals of people who said they cared about her, and a husband who can get lost driving even when there’s a GPS in the car. But she gets beyond all of it as she forgives and forgets.
After twenty years of marriage I no longer think it’s a bad short-term memory that allows her to forget all of the junk. I think it’s a good short-term memory. One that obeys her wishes to empty itself so that she can overlook things that have potential to rob her of her future joy. She loves to laugh and have fun, she loves to be happy and smile, and she loves to live in the moment and show love to people. These are the things you can’t do when you’re holding tightly to bitter memories.
When I think about what she does it seems extremely vulnerable to me. It seems hard. She doesn’t build self-protective walls. She puts herself at the risk of being hurt again — by that same person — in that same way. She knows that if she builds those walls they will cage her spirit — and my wife is nothing if not a free spirit.
I’ve had a bunch of reminders of this truth of forgiveness and forgetfulness this past weekend in one form or another. It’s one thing to learn from our past. It’s an entirely different thing to put the bad stuff in a folder for safe keeping and preserve it in a filing cabinet for future use. No one puts moldy food in a Tupperware container for dinner next month. So why do we do that to our souls with past experiences?
For some of us it’s harder than others. Some of us have been holding on to the need to defend ourselves for so long that we aren’t sure of any other way to live. Even if the memories were created by true occurrences and you have deep scars, those things weigh down your ability to ever be happy. Happiness comes from letting go. Joy comes from forgetting. Sometimes the best thing we can say is “I don’t remember that.”