Nick's Journal
CN Tower climb - Best part was getting home after the brunch (Mildred's is great!) and my 9 year old daughter greeted me at the door, asked me to turn around, saw my time and said 'Daddy - you got slower' with an evil impish smirk.
Pics of the climb time for posterity. I haven't climbed a single flight of stairs since last year so I guess I'll take it but now I need to do it again next year to get back to under 14 minutes.
Nick’s Journal
I wanted to focus this week on the concept of Forgiveness.
No longer being in a political quagmire it is nice to be able to pivot increasingly away from personality traits that I had acquired due to necessity but that did not really fit my true views or preferences or ultimately serve my interests.
When you are young and ambitious you are often pursuing certain outcomes to the exclusion of other considerations. Humanity, kindness, empathy, sacrifice, compassion, patience – these are very hard to come by in such an environment – they are viewed as weaknesses, as anomalies. I did my best to maintain these and it came largely with negative feedback from that environment, other than in the actual interactions themselves.
Many are seeking advancement above and beyond those around them (relative status trumps absolute status after all), they will attack threats to their own goals as if the world was a small place with little to no opportunity rather than a place of overflowing abundance – a scarcity mindset, cultivated purposefully by the organizations they work for. Some people will stop at almost nothing in pursuit of these things.
They will sacrifice friendships and relationships without a second thought. Will attach to any personality, no matter how warped or broken, provided the promise of power exists. They will sell their soul for a dollar basically. It is a story as old as time.
And yet the 'rewards' are often laughable at best. A few thousand more dollars (when nearly any external opportunity is offering more, for less effort by miles, relatively early into your career). Or, if you are truly 'blessed', a slightly faster promotion to a slightly nicer title. Relative status is weaponized against you so you accept peanuts and think you've earned something truly worthwhile, as it is more than your peers in the small bubble that surrounds you.
That, and the experience you are gaining truly does have long-term value, and lots of it, at least for a time, and you will accept a lot of hardship to derive that value. When you are in the thick of it, these can mean everything to you and yet when you are out of it, they seem nearly meaningless - because they mostly are.
Having been in charge of dispensing the koolaid, for propping up the house of cards, for many years of my career (and the resulting dirt on my soul that I still am scrubbing away at as a result!) I know the allure that can exist, the game that is being played. I spoke briefly of elitism and will likely touch on it again at some point, but it is a ‘private club of private clubs’ atmosphere that permeates finance. It is the brand, the 'important files' and the carrot of equity (as equity is life-changing wealth) that is wielded against those who lose sight of other things – the slow accumulation of sunk costs that make changing your goal increasingly harder, as the goal is all you have left if you let it become too all-encompassing.
The classic corporate cheese chasing, the hunt for those that will sacrifice everything else in pursuit of the cheese so as to wrangle the most value possible from those people, to offload their own work and responsibilities fully onto them from their position of privilege.
What does the above have to do with Forgiveness then?
What I am trying to illustrate is that people are complicated beings, with different drives and ambitions at different stages of their life, and also very much at the mercy of the environments they find themselves in, and the pressures and incentives that those environments drive. They make choices without understanding the implications, navigating life completely blind in many ways.
And as a result they will do things that you would view as indicative of any number of negative or personal failings, but from their perspective they would view as completely appropriate, even honorable or necessary – in the pursuit of their goals. And who is to say who is right or wrong in each of these? To each person, they are right after all. You just want different things.
I view people as an accumulation of actions over time. If I took them on their worst day, at their worst moment, then I would almost certainly not want to associate with them. And if I took them on their best day at their best moment then I would place them on a pedestal that they will never live up to and would be destined for disappointment. Forgiveness allows you to navigate life’s ups and downs with individuals, it's what allows for longer term relationships to exist. On a long enough timeline, everyone will let you down, many times even. On that same timeline though many people will surprise you on the upside just as often. If you don’t fancy being alone or surrounded by transient fake friends whom you've only known for a year or so later in life, you should begin to truly value Forgiveness.
It will teach you how to take your own narratives out of events, your own personal storyline out of everything that happens. Almost everything someone else is doing is not about you, it's about them. When they do something that truly cannot be justified (and many seemingly bad things really can be justified quite often, when you see the big picture), it is due to their failings, their inner demons, and it’s a debt that their soul is incurring, growth that they will have to learn. Or they will live the life that comes with those actions, each step taking them further down those paths - and will bear all the consequences that come with that.
It would be nice if everyone accounted for other people properly in all their actions (with kindness ideally but even just accounted for them at all) but they almost always do not. You do not as well, even if you are well-intentioned, as you don’t understand their views enough to truly do so. When you are angry at someone it's normally because they didn’t do what you wanted them to, what YOU felt they should do, that is what they did 'wrong' in your mind.
And so, Forgiveness is the ability to allow them their perspective, to understand their choice is valid to them or they would not have chosen it. It may be incorrect or flawed to you, it may not be what you think you would personally do, it may not be what YOU wanted, but you are not them, not their lived experiences, not their fears and desires and emotions, not their challenges and pressures. You are putting yourself in their shoes but looking out of their eyes with your own, not theirs.
For people you truly care about, Forgiveness is about allowing for mistakes, for transgressions, for conflict, and room to grow from these things. It provides space for the other person, security but not suffocation, healing where there was hurt, a bridge that remains unburned.
For those you ultimately don’t care about, it simply removes them from your thoughts. You forgive them their actions and free yourself from caring about them. They will live their life as they see fit – they don’t matter to you though, as they have demonstrated themselves to be of a character you are not interested in having a relationship with. You wish them nothing but positive growth and if they reentered your life as a changed and amazing person, you would have no reservations about them doing so. The world is full of these sorts, to worry about such would be to fill your time with nothing but, and to no benefit. And so release yourself from that burden.
And probably the most important lesson of all with Forgiveness is that if you ever find yourself in a situation in which reconciliation is possible, where both parties have come back into each others' lives with good intentions, be prepared to ACCEPT forgiveness, not just offer it. No matter what your personal feelings are, the other person will have their personal feelings as well and if you cannot accept that they might feel that they were the wronged party, even while you think they have wronged you, it will all be for naught. If reconciliation is even needed you can rest assured that they felt wronged as well.
I have had some truly ridiculous things done to me over the years, by people I both think highly of and by people that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, and by people small and inconsequential. I am not a wallflower, not someone who stays out of the limelight after all, so I attract more than my fair share of controversy at times. And I certainly mess up in ways that warrant it - the more you put yourself out there, the more you put out your less fortunate moments as well. And I try to work through Forgiveness in all these situations. Sadly, it's actually easiest when it's someone you didn’t think highly of to begin with, as they are a simple forgive and move on, never to be thought of again.
The ones you care most deeply about, those people you value most – they are the ghosts that you’ll live with for the rest of your life if they leave your life, as Forgiveness means you will not burn them out even a little, will not forget all that was good, and that shit is HARD.
They are also the people you’ll grow closest to in life if they don’t leave though, and that shit is EVERYTHING.
Much love as always,
Nick
Quotes:
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. - Mahatma Gandhi
Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. - August Wilson