WHAT IS FORGIVENESS?: Not a trick question. Those who know me well might know that this is something I’ve puzzled about for a while. I want to know when it’s over!–when have I finished forgiving these people who irk me?! …Which is not really a helpful approach. Still… here are some very scattered thoughts about how to forgive, for people, like me, for whom this is far from obvious.

a. Act to promote the other person’s well-being. Seriously. Take some specific action to make the other person’s life better. This only counts if your action is not related to the things you dislike about the person!–i.e. you can’t be all, “Telling her she’s a great big moron was my way of contributing to her spiritual well-being! It’s tough love, baby!” No–take particular, specific actions that improve the other person’s life.

b. What if it were easy? There is probably at least one person in your life whom you find it very easy to forgive. This is a person you love: a spouse, a friend, a parent, a child, somebody. If this person goes around being horrible to others and to you, you don’t just sit there and take it–for her sake, you tell her why what she’s doing is wrong. You do your best to stop her from acting wrongly. This even though she’s the person you forgive quicker than anyone else.

From this experience we learn one important thing: Challenge isn’t separate from love. You adore her, therefore you try to stop her when you think she might harm herself or others. Love doesn’t mean, “Okay honey, do whatever you want, I don’t care.”

Okay… so try to apply this, analogously, to people you don’t immediately love. What if you loved them? What if it were easy to forgive them?

You still wouldn’t pretend like they had never done anything wrong. Forgiveness doesn’t mean pretending the wrong never happened. It doesn’t mean that you can’t take the wrongdoing into account when trying to figure out if you should trust the other person with a confidence, or a $20 bill.

c. See her best self. What forgiveness does mean is that you will look for the person’s best self. You won’t make up fantasy selves for the person; you won’t pretend she’s stronger than she is. But you will keep always in your head a vision of who she needs to be.

If you do that: You won’t gossip about her. You won’t interpret every lapse as yet another piece of evidence that she’s always like that. When you find yourself yelling at the image of her you carry around in your head, you’ll stop yourself, and go find something shiny to look at instead.

d. I don’t even know who said this, but there’s this saying that refusing to forgive is like taking rat poison and hoping that the rat dies. And this is the crux. Look–if your best friend was the one who refused to forgive, what would you want her to do? Wouldn’t it break your heart to see her so wound up about the people she dislikes, or the people who have hurt her? Wouldn’t you want her to act as if the important people in her life are the ones who love her?

So okay. I’m trying to live in a more forgiving way. This is very hard for me, because I do tend to carry around images of Those Who Thwart Me!!!! in my head. So if you all have other thoughts on forgiveness, I’d really like to hear them. I can use all the help I can get!