Their discussion about who they were and where they'd come from made me remember a Martin Luther King quote....
- "We ain’t what we ought to be. We ain’t what we could be. We ain’t what we gonna be, but thank God we ain’t what we were.”
I try to remind myself of this quote often, especially when I find myself shaking my head over the injustices in today's world that have no place in the 21st century such as the fight to set women back 100 years over abortion rights or the constant desire of the Conservative Right to tell the LGBT community that they are "less than" the rest of us and don't deserve the right to marry the love of their life or adopt children. I've watched in disgust as the state in which I reside stripped away the rights of single individuals who hoped to adopt or even foster children, instead allowing these orphan kids to languish away until they aged out of the system at eighteen and are then released onto the street without any further assistance. I bristle when I think of the inequality of allowing guaranteed citizenship to Cubans thanks to the "wet foot/dry foot" policy while refusing to acknowledge the contributions made by the Central American immigrants to our economy, our tax system and how they are single-handedly shoring up the Social Security system for the white man who works so diligently to keep them in their place of modern day slaves. I could go on and on but when I feel my blood pressure rising, I silently mouth the words "at least we ain't where we were". I have to remind myself that having a bunch of old white men in Congress trying to tell me what I can or can not do with my body and whether or not I am qualified to raise children in the eyes of the law are both just tiny drops in the bucket of inequality compared to what the Abileens of the world had to suffer through. And I also have to remind myself that as a middle-classed white woman, I have the luxury of getting infuriated at the status quo and I doing something about it. The 1960s era Abileens were helpless. Doing something about it was a life or death decision for them.
Okay, well, not sure how I got off on the tangent because that wasn't at all the direction I was headed with this post.
What really resonated with me was when Viola discussed how she came to her forties and after much soul-searching realized that her definition of a successful life had been defined by other people and suddenly who she was and where she was going didn't fit into her image of success. And the hardest part was realizing that not only was some of the decisions she was about to make in her life going against the grain of everyone else's definition of success for her but she would encounter people who didn't want to see her succeed, for whatever reason. The pain she felt was palpable in her quivering voice and her coal black eyes filled with the tears she refused to allow to drop off her eyelashes. Here was the story I could relate to. I can't imagine Abileen's life but I understand Viola's. I've had that same midlife crisis. I know the slow-creeping shock of realizing you've been walking in the wrong direction for most of your life. This, I understand completely.
As she talked about the pain of waking up to her own life, of experiencing others who didn't want her to succeed, of feeling lost and adrift, she talked about hurt feelings and forgiveness....forgiveness of others and of herself. And she quoted someone that seemed to put it all in perspective. She said, "forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could be any different." Those words washed over me like a cooling rain shower on a hot summer day. I always thought of forgiveness as something you directed toward another person or a particular event but this is directing the forgiveness at your internal self. It is myself who wishes constantly for things to have turned out differently but this is saying I'm letting go of that wish because I can't change the past. It is us who constantly evaluate the past, wringing our hands in disbelief, berating ourselves and beating ourselves up. It's our internal dialogue that whispers into our ears...if only I'd done, why didn't I just, I handled it all wrong, I could have saved them, it's all my fault.....
I've always believed that we don't grieve our losses nearly as much as we grieve what we were suppose to have. The children who beg to return to their abusive parents don't really want to go back into those painful homes nearly as much as they crave the kind of parents they were suppose to have. Women constantly go back to an abusive husband not because they see the good in him but because they believe in the "potential" good in him. It's like we want to re-live our histories in the hopes of a "do-over", another chance to make it right, the opportunity to choose what's behind door number two. But this quote recognizes that there's no going back and you can't change what's already happened, no matter how much you crave a better outcome. It recognizes that even if every bad move was caused by your actions, you can't replay the game. Once squeezed out, you can't put the toothpaste back into the tube.
For me, this quote is the most honest thing a person can ever say to themselves. It acknowledges that you can't change the past but still gives you the opportunity to learn from it. As soon as you recognize the past for what it was and let go of the hope of changing it, you can follow up by saying but never again, I'll never let anyone treat me like that again, I'll never be a doormat for someone again, I'll never react that way again, I can't change someone else's choices, next time will be different, I deserve better than that, I am better than that..... Immediately you stop asking why the other person choose the path they did, you stop asking why it couldn't have been different, you stop seeing the possibility that it ever could have been different and you realize that it was what it was...good, bad or ugly...it simply was what it was and there's no changing that now.
I've spent many years trying to forgive those who hurt me or my loved ones...a feat that requires the faith of Buddha and still feels nearly impossible....now I know I don't have to forgive them. I simply have to stop wondering why it couldn't have been different and I can stop expecting more from them than they were capable of being. For some reason, this feels a whole lot easier than forgiving the person or the act. It feels doable, it feels honest, it feels logical...it feels right.
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