Thursday, February 13, 2014

Revenge

Revenge, we have all at some stage at least planned an elaborate revenge on someone. Nobody gets through life without being hurt or treated wrongly by someone. It may be a relationship gone sour, it may be a business deal turned bad, or a friendship destroyed. For whatever reason, the desire to get even, to get revenge is strong in all of us.

We feel better planning revenge - for some of us that is as far as it gets, a regular mood fix of imagining extreme and creative revenge on the person who betrayed us in some way. Some people carry out the revenge; stories abound of wives taking out highly inventive revenge on errant husbands, and business partners going to extreme lengths to destroy their former partners.

But what personal cost does that revenge bring? Sure it feels great at the time, the person who hurt us has been hurt in return, the scales are balanced. But is it a permanent cure? Does it really help to hurt that person - who in the end is hurt the most?

I've thought about this a lot - of course in my life I've been hurt by people, and I've imagined all kinds of marvellous types of revenge. I've been hurt in my personal life and in my work life. I've wondered why me, I've worried, fretted and tried to come up with realistic ways of exacting revenge.

But what I've come to believe is that revenge is not worth it, the cost to  me is too high. To carry out revenge on someone is to carry within me the hurt and the pain they caused me. And when is the revenge enough, how many times will I need to hurt someone in return before I feel vindicated? I don't know. What I believe is that continuing to try to hurt someone in retaliation for hurting me, is to carry around the initial hurt inside me for an indefinite length of time. I am the one who is not moving forward, I am the one standing still instead of making my own path through life. And that means that I am the one ultimately who suffers.

So while I am not a good enough person to forgive past hurts, I have reached the understanding that to let it go, to let it live in the past where it belongs is the best thing for me. To be a happier person, a better person, a kinder person and a less damaged person I have to let go of all past hurts. Not to forget, not even to forgive, but to let them stay in the past and go peacefully forward into my future unencumbered. That is my personal truth. Yours may be different, at least right now. But think about it, be still and quiet and really think about it.

The best form of revenge is to be happy - that's a saying that has been around for a very long time and like most of these sayings it is because it is true. The best and kindest thing you can do for yourself is to have peace in your soul. You can't do that if your soul is grey and bitter. You can't have peace if your thoughts are occupied with finding ways to hurt another person. So let it go, let the greater power punish that person at the right time in the right way.

Switch your focus instead onto improving your own life. Focus on you, on who you are and what you want in your life. Put the past back in the past and live in the now and plan for a happy future. Planning revenge is negative, it lets negativity into your life. Remember positive thinking brings positive results - and that does not mean being positive that your particular revenge is perfect!

This is your life and nobody else's. It is your choice to continue to feel hurt by the actions of someone else. It is also your choice (although harder) to let it go. But in the end the person you are hurting is you, and likewise the person that you help is also you.








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