The Real Thought Behind Forgiviness, Explored

For me, forgiveness is such a slippery slope and, yet, today's "Thought for Today" says that forgiveness is "something we do for ourselves," as it says here: https://www.thoughtfortoday.org.uk/forgive-to-give/. Forgiving myself is something I don't think I am very good at doing. When I screw up, I get down on myself and my self-talk turns to negative tongue lashings that echo in my mind until I think that whatever I did or thought or didn't do or didn't think is worse than it really is, which is not a healthy path for me. I have pondered this path that is well-traveled in my private journal many times since I stopped drinking booze. I wrote a lot about that era in my life on the blog post called Reflections 23 of 23. I read that post at least twice a year: August 15 & December 31st. It holds a lot of water, even if some of the things I wrote about haven't come to fruition for one reason or another.

When I think about forgiving others, I think of the meme I downloaded and have somewhere, but not anywhere handy. Paraphrased, it goes something like this:

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A boy went to his father and said he wanted to get married. The father said, "Say I'm sorry." The boy said, "For what?" The father said, "Just say it." The boy said, "But what did I do?" Again, the father insisted, "Say I'm sorry." Confused, the boy finally said, "Okay. I'm sorry." The father smiled. "Good. Now you're ready to get married. While you don't always have to know exactly what you did, you have to be able to ask for forgiveness from your spouse if you have hurt her."

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Okay, the meme isn't really exactly that. This is the real version:

Where our versions diverge is the meme ends at the second to last sentence - my version adds the last sentence. I think my version of it ties in better with the "Thought for Today." And, just doing some word association, a lot of tunes mention forgiveness and I could embed a truckload of them below. To me, though, Don Henley's "The Heart of the Matter" is the #1 song of all time that mentions the idea of asking for forgiveness.

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Editor's Note: Don Henley is now a label on this blog. About damn time! When are you going to write about The Eagles as that label does not exist either!