I’m sometimes slightly hazy about the roughest parts of my life. It isn’t that I have no grip on reality. More that time has a way of softening the edges of hardest truths and making them less edgy.
I seem to have imagined away a lot of the worst stuff. These days, it’s more dreamy. Less like the haunted awfulness of youth. Some of the really bad stuff I worked through. Writing my book was unquestionably one of the major ways I worked through it. It seems I’m better at settling my emotional hash writing about it than talking about it.
Even the people I once hated … I don’t hate them anymore. I don’t like them, either, but they are just people now. I have a distaste for them and I certainly am not going to have a party and invite them round for cookies and tea, but the edge of rage and obsession is gone.
It’s all about imagination. The ability to believe I could come from a bad place to a better place. A kind of forgiving in which I recognize it isn’t my job to fix this. What remains is for some higher power to take it on — and good luck to him, her, or them.
Imagination made it possible for me to survive childhood, try unknown things without obsessing on what might happen if I got it wrong. I could believe that things might look bad, but might not stay bad — and even the worst might get better if I just stuck with it.
Imagination is not merely making up stories. Imagination is the fuel of hope. It’s the big engine under your personal rocket lifting into the sky.
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Categories: Personal
SERENDIPITY: SEEKING INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH 
Then there are those whom we have heated discussions with( some would say “Fights”), but we get over it and realize that it was never anything we couldn’t resolve between us. Usually it’s been that way for years, and frankly, we wouldn’t have it any other way. Keeps the mind agile.
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It has been said that in a marriage where there is no fighting, there is also no marriage. Ponder that one.
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Hi Marilyn, what you have written here is very sensible. It is funny how people who have affronted us in our lives eventually slide out of significance. I am younger than you, but I have noticed this.
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I had a very close, very religiously Christian friend who explained what “forgiveness” means. It doesn’t mean you want to be “friends again” or have another relationship. It means you realize that curing this problem is not within your power and passing it off, in her case to God, in mine to some indefinable higher power. It made a huge difference, especially when it came to family members. I could let them go without feeling a need to put them back in my circle. I think most people — certainly I did — don’t understand what that “forgiveness” means. I think if they understood it, they would use it in their lives. Unfortunately, I’m simply not Christian and don’t feel I can explain this. Not my wheelhouse.
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HI Marilyn, I think you have explained this very well. Forgiveness is letting it go out of your own heart and soul.
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Yes, but MOST people think it means re-including that person in your life. It doesn’t mean that and this makes a huge difference to almost everyone. Most of us can let it go, as long as we don’t have to set a place at the table for whoever it is.
That conversation with my friend, who I hope is resting in peace, was an epiphany for me. It changed my whole way of looking at the concept. Maybe I should write about it, though I feel as a non-Christian that it might be inappropriate. I’ll have to think about it. But that’s actually what my book was about — letting the bad things go and not dwelling in and with them.
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I must read your book. I will do so. I get this completely, although you can’t cut family members out of your life entirely, you have to try and make a go of getting along with them.
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I did eventually cut my father out completely. It took a very long time, but in the end, he made it easy by just being himself.
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I am sorry, Marilyn. Life is full of adversity and it comes in different ways to people.
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