Is it possible to pass through the world without ever being wronged? Has even a year gone by — or perhaps a single month — without someone offering a reproach that seemed unjustified in your eyes? Even the lives of the greatest saints are filled with stories of wrongs done to them.
No one in this world is spared injustice. Nor is every wrong committed intentionally. Well-meant advice can easily be mistaken for reproach; the limits of language and human understanding invite such confusion.
How, then, should you proceed when troubled by a wrong done to you? Before doing anything, it is right to listen to yourself. But it is unwise to be led by the first surge of emotion, which so often urges retaliation or escalation. Better to listen to the quieter voice within: the one that does not answer at once, but gives the response time to mature and arise from somewhere deeper.
It is also wise to observe the proper measure — to recognize when further effort has become pointless, futile, or even dangerous. Why waste your strength arguing with someone whose chief aim is to hurt you? Keep your energy for someone who means you well.
Your greatest influence is over yourself — over what you say, what you do, and how you respond. Yet even over yourself your rule is incomplete. You cannot command the sudden quickening of your pulse, the rush of adrenaline, or the tightening pain in your chest. You can, however, gradually influence how you respond to these impulses and what relationship you form with the wrong you have suffered. You are not the author of another person's actions and cannot control them, though at times you can — or must — oppose them. Nor will you ever make everyone close to you content with who you are. In trying, you might lose yourself.
You may say, “Surely I must react when someone wrongs me.” Yet refusing ever to let anything pass is another kind of servitude. You bind yourself to answering everything and everyone, and in doing so surrender your freedom to choose.
To be invulnerable is not to be untouched. A wrong can strike and wound you. You may ask for an apology, an explanation, or restitution. But all of these depend on the other person as well, and none can be guaranteed. Clinging to redress may draw the wrong more deeply into you.
A reproach presents a different question. If it is justified, it is reasonable to consider it and learn from it. To err is human. If it is unjustified, let it trouble first the person who uttered it, not you. Yet a reproach often contains something justified and something unjustified at once. Both sides may see part of the truth without either possessing it whole. A father may prevent his son from doing something dangerous, while the son rightly asks for freedom even though freedom carries risk. Sometimes it is worth examining what truth a reproach contains. At other times, such examination merely feeds an unpleasant situation. Here too, one must know the measure.
There is no use, then, in trying to avoid wrongs and reproaches altogether; they will find you whether you wish it or not. Nor is there use in meeting them with a heart of stone, for that would cost you part of your humanity. What matters is finding within yourself a way not to remain bound to them. Forgiveness — of yourself and of others — may be part of that release.
Forgiveness can be one path to release. Such release allows you to move on without carrying a past wrong like a weight within you. You may surround yourself with a thousand activities, but a wrong left unresolved within will not disappear. A hurt suffered in one relationship may enter the next. A wrong done by one colleague may change how you look at all the others.
Release sometimes asks for time, just as a deep wound does not heal in a single dusk. Forgiveness may come, but it cannot be forced. We can give pain room and attend to it in the present, allowing it to change its shape and soften.
To forgive is not to approve of the wrong, nor must it mean reconciliation with the person who committed it. Neither does it mean remaining passive when it is necessary to speak or to defend yourself or others. It is one way of allowing yourself to be released from the wrong: refusing to let the present continue to be determined by what happened in the past.
Release does not mean forgetting. Just as old, healed wounds ache when the weather changes, the memory of a distant wrong that no longer governs you may return. Be kind, compassionate, and patient with yourself and with others. Let the weight of the wrong pass over you like clouds over a landscape — and let it go.