Doogie Howser and Forgiveness

On vacation, the family and I discovered the Hub cable channel. I delighted in the whole family sitting down and watching "Family Ties" which I had not seen in years. After the kids went to bed, "Doogie Howser" came on. I love Neil Patrick Harris in his current work. As the show came to a close, he typed his signature ending and I thought, wow, is that where the seeds of my blogging and self examination began.

A few weeks later, I flipped on Doogie again towards the end of the show just to see what he was typing. A son who works at the hospital was unable to forgive his father, who must have come in as a patient. The show ended without a reconciliation. Doogie typed out and I'm paraphrasing, he wished the son would forgive his dad not because the dad deserved it but because.... the son did.

Oh holy moments of clarity, just what I needed to hear from a sitcom! I was grappling with forgiveness myself. All of the stories that I hear it is not for the other person but for the "forgiver." Yet letting go of the anger is soooo difficult. Anger can become a very comfortable place to be, even if it keeps you mucked in the past. Moving to a different emotional territory and way of being is scary and extremely uncomfortable but I am plugging along. (And you know how much I don't like being uncomfortable.) After reading and doggedly keeping my mind on the topic, with the help of an online friend, I began to realize that the anger that would come over me, was actually me, "my soul" trying to tell myself not to be mad at the other person but to DO things a DIFFERENT way. Channel all of that anger into the next level of my true self. It takes lots of energy to change my way of being. I REALLY want to do that I had been beating myself up, telling myself I needed to forgive and I knew that I needed to accept but how? It took the aha moment to start thinking of things in a different way. Breaking it wide open and rewiring those synapses.
I'm letting that revelation just set for a while and funny I also haven't been angry either...
But like Doogie, I look forward to typing it out. I love learning from life. At this point any other option is unacceptable.