Mind Boggling - Chapter 7

Mind Boggling

By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta

During my last work out I reviewed the changes I had made in my life over the recent past and was impressed that I had actually maintained the new attitude to driving, sharing lifts and exercising. Usually old habits die hard so I wondered how come it was so easy. I concluded that being happy is something I truly desire and am willing to change my life to attain it.

I ran out of giving options. When I tried to think of something else to give, I couldn’t see any justification. As I said earlier, DO NOT give if you are not happy to give. So I decided to think of something else. What about forgiving??

Oh my, now that for me is a huge challenge. I had to grab a seat to avoid losing my balance when thinking about the possibility that I could actually make a decision to forgive some people in my life who I had written off as red tongued dragons. I knew that I was completely justified in not forgiving those people and moving on with my life keeping as far away from them as possible. If I met any of those people, even their relatives, I would just walk past in silence even if they said hello. Hardhearted was my middle name. I could not imagine that someone could betray a person as good as me. I counted all the good things I had done for those people and then thought about what they did to me. How could they? If they did that to me, they must be demons in disguise and they don’t deserve even being looked at with the eyes of a person as good as me. Hey, am not an angel, I have my weaknesses.

I dismissed that idea of forgiving before it could even grow a stick thin root in my mind. NO WAY can I forgive those people and in any case, what would forgiveness entail? As it is, I have moved on with my life and I don’t think about them. I never took any revenge against them, I just wrote them off. I had forgiven them really, its only that I hadn’t told them and anyway, they should have figured it out by now since I never went back to claim whats mine. They should understand that I cannot possibly talk to them, we come from different worlds and we were just not meant to be friends. Hey even the Good God Almighty has an arch enemy called Satan with whom reconciliation is seemingly impossible so I too am entitled to have my own satan, ok maybe two or three satans since I am human after all!

As much as I desire to be happy, I don’t think that talking to those people and making peace with them will make me happy. How can it? Imagine me talking to someone who did such a grievous thing to me, someone who betrayed my trust. I mean they say that trust is like virginity, once lost, it can never be regained. How can I believe anything those people say, how do I know that their motives are not to hurt me again? They also say: You hurt me once, you are to blame, you hurt me twice, I am to blame. No way can I possibly learn to trust those people or even to like them.

This forgiving thought was the most tiring thought I have ever entertained in my mind. I tried to push it out, it kept peeping to ask if I can just let it have a glass of water in the kitchen of my mind. “As long as you don’t so much as breathe in the direction of the bedroom of my mind, you can have the water”. That’s what I told it the other day and true to its word, it just took the glass of water and left. But not before planting an idea in my mind. What about writing down the names of all the people who are currently in my life and seeing if they have wronged me in the past at all. I actually thought that this was a good idea. It’s a simple enough exercise and maybe it would be nice to understand why I feel sooooooooooooooooooooo bad about those satans of mine. So I did the exercise.