Forgive the Fuck Ups

We all fucked up in one way or another. People in our lives, they too, have fucked up.
But just because one “fucks up” doesn’t mean they are “a fuck up”.

Realizing this, that’s forgiveness.

Forgiveness is one of the most essential attributes of the lazy man. To be able to forgive is to be able to be at peace of mind.

Whereas procrastination is the heart of time management, relaxing is the heart of forgiveness. It’s the ability to move on and not give a fuck about the pain someone caused you or pain you may have even caused yourself.

Forgiveness is about relaxing, coming to terms with how things are, and not pouring energy into bitching, whining, and moaning about shit. Now, to clarify, that doesn’t mean you just suck up and tolerate said shit. It does mean, you don’t ruminate and obsess over it though.

Forgiveness is acceptance. It’s saying “alright, that’s how it is.” As simple as that. And not seeking some sort of revenge or otherwise holding onto resentment. It’s being open to the reality of the world, without any sort of malicious desire to change it or “make them pay!”

Forgiveness is not bargaining  for an apology or even expecting one at all for that matter. It’s not an attempt to ease the feelings of another person you may have wronged or that wronged you either. No. 

Forgiveness is coming to peace with what happened and how things went down. It’s not necessarily excusing someone’s hurtful behavior, nor is it even any sort of “truce” in a fight.

As a matter of fact, you don’t need to necessarily forgive someone verbally in order to reach forgiveness. Forgiveness is more of a personal mindset. It’s letting go of any negative emotions associated with someone or something and admitting to yourself “that’s the way it is.”

It doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t want to change things. Likewise, it doesn’t mean you’re particularly happy with the person in question, the person who fucked up towards you.

But in forgiveness, you accept. You accept the negative emotions. You accept how you feel. You accept what the person did, like it or not.

Acceptance is not to be confused with approval, by the way. By accepting what happened, by forgiving, you’re not saying “I like the way you did that and I’d love it if you could do it again for me, please.” No.

What you’re saying is “I don’t like or approve of what you did at all, but I understand why you did it. I wouldn’t want you to ever do something like that again, but I get that happened and there’s nothing that can be changed about the past. Moving forward, I’m willing to forgive you, but I can’t and won’t accept that sort of behavior in the future.”

By offering forgiveness, you are offering a bit of empathy. You are giving the person a chance to be human and well, fuck up once in a while. Of course, sometimes you have to walk away from a toxic person or situation.

Now, that still doesn’t mean you shouldn’t forgive them. There is also a difference between offering forgiveness and making amends.

Sometimes you can make amends through forgiveness, but forgiveness does not always lead to amends being made. In other words, saying “I forgive you” is NOT the equivalent of saying “I want to keep you in my life.” That would be making amends.

Through forgiveness, you are simply stating that there is no grudge or hard feelings between the two of you. 

One may think that it’s “hard to forgive” someone that really, really fucked up.

But here’s so much work involved in failing to forgive. So much energy depleting shit. Today we’re going to talk about how taking the easy way out means offering forgiveness. We’re gonna look at what exactly forgiveness is and how to implement it in your lazy little life, so you can relax more and stress less. And without further to do, let’s dive...right into it!
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The benefits of forgiveness.
The first thing I want to cover in this article is why you should go about practicing forgiveness to begin with. I mean someone is an asshole to us, why bother forgiving them anyway? They’ll probably continue to be an asshole.

And see that’s the thing. Accepting the fact that they are an asshole (not that you’d call them that. Don’t resort to name calling. But you accept that they are the way they are.)

What this does is allow you to be at peace with it. Again, that doesn’t mean you like it. That doesn’t mean you approve of it. It simply means that you are *okay* with it. It doesn’t rustle your feathers. You remain cool and laid back. You remain lazy. You couldn’t care less about what the person did or what the person does. 

It doesn’t affect you whatsoever. Not mentally. Not emotionally. You’re completely detached with the event or series of events and it pays no burden to your existence. 

Studies have shown that forgiveness can lead to lower blood pressure, reduced anxiety, better sleep, and improved self esteem. Ah better sleep and no anxiety? Now if that doesn’t sound like the life of a lazy man I don’t know what does.

By forgiving, you are *literally* relaxing. You are relaxing your worries about how this person treated you. You are relaxing about the mistakes they made. You’re not in denial about them. You just don’t let it rile you all up. You don’t let it upset you at all.

Basically, through forgiveness you manage to achieve what we procrastin8rs all want to achieve: peace of mind and relaxation.







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Remember you DO have a choice.

You may think you have no control over what happened or what the other person did or said. You may think you have no control over the other person’s behavior.

And you know what?

You’re right. You have absolutely no control over any of that shit. It’s not your choice over the words they decided to use. It’s not your choice over the actions they decided to take.

Maybe they lied. Maybe they cheated. Maybe they betrayed you in some other way.

You can’t control that. And certainly it wasn’t an option you’d pick to have it happen in the first place.

The choice you do have though, the choice you *can* make is whether or not to let it actually bother you.

Choosing to forgive means choosing to say “I know this happened, but I won’t let it bother me.” By “bother”, I mean it doesn’t overpower you with negative thoughts and feelings on a chronological basis.

Instead of ruminating over just how terrible that person is,  you can choose to forgive them and let bygones be bygones.

While you may not be able to choose who wounds you and how, it is entirely within your power to decide whether or not to pick at the scab.

Let yourself heal. Choose to let yourself heal. Choose to forgive. You don’t have to resent a person eternally just because they hurt you in the past. And if you do, it’s a choice you made to do so.

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Don’t play the blame game

Hanging around and blaming someone for “making you the way you are” does neither of you any good. 

It doesn’t make you feel any better and it makes the other person take responsibility for your own emotions. And your own emotions, that’s something you have to deal with, dude.

You must accept that they hurt you. Forgive them. But it is your responsibility to deal with that pain. It’s your responsibility to either let it corrupt you or let it help you grow. 

Taking responsibility for our own reaction to the pain is part of true forgiveness. It’s part of letting go and moving on.

If you become fearful or anxious because of the way a person in the past has treated you, it’s not *them* that are “making” you feel that way. You are in charge of your own emotions and reactions to things. 

Again, you can’t control what happens, but you can control how you react to it. That is all your choice.

What you do with that pain, the way you let it change you, that is what you are choosing.

Maybe there’s an asshole boss who yells at his employees all the time and barely cuts them a break and says he acts that way because he was abused by his father. He blames his father for making him so power hungry and ruthless, the way he was treated. But really, he can’t blame his shitty father figure for his own lack of kindness and empathy. That’s on him. It may have been a painful experience, but failure to forgive his father and let it go has led him to become a short-tempered fiery man as an adult.

By blaming our own flaws on the words and actions of others, we can never really change. See, because we can’t change that which is outside ourselves. We can only change from within.

Making a scapegoat out of the way a person behaved or treated you is nothing but an excuse to not not deal with your own pain. It’s tempting to point fingers and say “It’s all their fault!” when someone hurts us.

But doing so is not the lazy way. It puts us in a mindset of not being able to control or have  a say in how *we* behave or how *we* react to things. But again, that is really our only choice. 

By blaming someone else for what we do, we take no responsibility and without responsibility, there is no choice. And that’s what builds up anxiety.

Don’t play the blame game and don’t play the victim card either. We all suffer and are oppressed in some way or another. You have to be able to deal with being offended. You can’t avoid being offended. That's life. And acting like the world owes you a favor by not offending you ever is so entitled.

Humble yourself a bit. Realize sometimes, yes, people are going to hate you. But you can’t let haters tear you down.

Face it, acting offended just makes the people who offended you even more offensive. Being unfazed, on the other hand, shows that you’ve forgiven what they said and don’t give a fuck.

Find meaning in your suffering

Someone close to us hurts us. It sucks. A lack of trust, something mean-spirited. Whatever it is that causes us to be hurt, the feeling of betrayal is so painful. 

But the point of suffering is not to just feel pain. I mean, there’s no denying that that’s certainly *a part of it* but  really just the tip of the iceberg.

Relax in your laziness, take a slow n steady step back and look at the bigger picture here.

Everything happens for a reason. Perhaps it’s a test of your wits, a test of your patience, a test of your emotional control. In what ways has the wrong helped you grow as a person?

Was there a light in the darkness?

You must ask yourself “What if this is a gift?” even in the shittiest of times. Because in the end, you can always find something to appreciate.

Forgiveness is focusing on what you appreciate over what you detest about a person or situation.

It’s not to diminish your pain but to make the best of it

Let go and go with the flow

The best way to forgive is to simply let go and go with the flow. Stop trying to change the way things turned out. Stop trying to turn a person into the imaginary version you hoped they would be. Accept that he/she are the way they are. Accept that things happened the way they happened.

You can’t swim against the current. You can’t force reality to change. Things are the way they are and it is your choice to either drown or float on.

You can’t change the unchangeable. You can’t alter things outside of your power. You can only adapt to the current set of circumstances and...flow with it. Remember, you control only how you react to things.

 You can’t control the flow. You can only control how you handle it. So go with it.

Part of forgiveness is letting go of that in which you cannot control and moving on with the flow.

Be Present

Another way to forgive is to be in “the now.” If you are unable to forgive it means you are living in the past. You are holding on to how a specific event from your own personal history made you feel.

This leads to an ongoing “haunting” to your emotional psyche. You feel one of the following:
Regret (sadness) Resentment (disgust),or Vengeance (anger)

And that is what keeps you from forgiving. You lock yourself in your own prison.

What do regret, resentment, and vengeance all have in common? They demonstrate the inability to forgive the past and move on.

If you are fully and completely present, the past can’t affect you any more. The past is gone. It doesn’t exist. Not in the present.

That’s not a denial that it happened. That’s admitting that it is NOT what is happening right this goddamn second. 

Things can happen so quickly - a fight, a break up, an act of betrayal. But we sometimes let it linger for ages past when they are gone.

Live presently and realize there’s no time machine or way of going back to change the story the way you see fit. Seek to forgive for what happened and be right here, right now, not then and there.
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Try to be understanding, not right

Oftentimes we struggle to forgive because we are so focused on proving a point that we forget to actually listen.

We want to win the debate and prove “once and for all” that what we’re saying is important and valid

Well here’s a spin: What they’re saying is also important and valid.

And you may say “Oh no! They’re wrong!” and go on to list a billion reasons as to why that may be true.

But when it comes to forgiveness, it’s not about proving who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s about empathy. It’s about understanding the other person’s view.

I can’t tell you how many relationships I damaged because I personally insisted on having the upper-hand at the time. Some of which were damaged beyond repair.

You can argue back and forth all you want, but it does neither of you any good. 

Even if you are right, even if the other person is way in the wrong, what does proving so really accomplish?

A feeling of victory and triumph?
Look, winning isn’t everything...especially when it comes to relationships and friendships.

Even if at the end fo the day, you still disagree, even if you decide not to see each other any more because of it, you’ll feel a stronger connection in taking the time to understand, taking the time to forgive, than you ever will in trying to win some sort of debate.

Don’t see it as a debate by the way. See it as an opportunity to learn from another’s point of view.

You’ll feel more “together” by understanding one another, even if you decide to go separate ways than you ever will if you try to one up another.
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Mistakes are Meh

Mistakes really aren’t a big deal. They happen to the best of us. You can’t live a mistake-free life.

Realize that the person you are struggling to forgive makes mistakes too. They aren’t perfect, nor should you expect them to be. Give them the benefit of the doubt as well as some leeway to fuck up once in a while.

Mistakes don’t make a person “a mistake.” It just makes them human. Forgive a person for the mistakes they made, because it’s really not fundamental to who they are as a person.

Again, it’s not that you’re approving or condoning the mistake itself by forgiving them for it. Rather, you’re telling them that you know they can do better and hope they follow through.

Allow a person to learn from mistakes rather than insist they always get it right. Even if they don’t get it right immediately, you have to realize that they are different than you. 

Just because they made a mistake that you clearly would never make in the first place doesn’t mean they aren’t willing or capable of improving.

Even if they wind up making a similar mistake, you may be ignoring the progress they had made.

Imagine a parent who’s watching their kid learn to ride a bike fall off time and time again.
The parent him or herself knows how to ride a bike. It would be wrong of them to yell every time they fell off (made a mistake).

Similarly, getting angry or frustrated every time your friend, family member, or significant other makes a mistake is probably not going to help them learn “to ride better”. Nor is it going to build any sort of stronger connection between the two of you.

Just like the parent who knows how to ride a bike, but is watching their kid try, realize you too may have skills and knowledge that others don’t, but that doesn’t mean you are necessarily “better”. Just different.

You may be making mistakes that the person you’re mad at would never make. We’re all learning and growing.

Forgive mistakes rather than harp on them.

Forgive Yourself

This is probably one of the hardest things about forgiveness...forgiving yourself.

Look, you can’t ever genuinely forgive another person unless you are willing and able to forgive yourself.

Forgiving yourself means releasing the tension and guilt you feel when you think about the past. It means letting go of your own mistakes and saying they are “meh”. It’s giving yourself the benefit of the doubt. It’s understanding yourself, understanding that you made the best decision you could have based on your current knowledge and emotions at the time.

Offer yourself the love, care, and forgiveness you deserve, because above all else, you’re pretty damn awesome dude, even if you have your “not-so-awesome” moments.

Forgive yourself for those moments and relax man. After all, it’s better to forgive your little fuck ups than to live a life in a constant apology.




Take it easy,

N8
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