Understand

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing
George Bernard

We always think we understand. Of course we know why someone did some action; we would have done it for that reason. "She looked at him with "hungry" eyes because she wants to sleep with him. That is the reason why I would look at an attractive member of the opposite sex like that". We practise a reverse empathy a little too well sometimes. In truth, she is not you and may have quite different reasons to look at him that way. But we tend to forget that and get angry.

It is the meaning that you assign to an event that determines how you feel about it. We really have only one emotion, excitement, and how we name it and deal with it depends on our interpretation of what is going on around us. How many times have you felt afraid of how something would turn out and then it turned out very well. Our emotion is just an interpretation, and is even more so when we are trying to guess how other people are feeling. And especially when we are trying to guess about how we feel about how they feel.

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing. It is only when we think we understand what is going on that we judge things to be good or bad. We assign a meaning to the situation which brings on the appropriate (negative) emotions. If I see a situation just as something that happened for no particular reason, or for some unknown reason, I can forgive it easily. If I see a situation as something that happened because "the world is out to get me" then it will be difficult to forgive. And I would be setting myself up for more of the same.