30 Days of Forgiveness 2015 - Day 13 - Crushed

"Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heal that has crushed it." --Mark Twain

Here's a story from the forgiveness files this week:

FORGIVING WHAT YOU HAVE ALREADY FORGOTTEN

 

I am a member of a local free site where members gift items they are no longer using to their neighbors instead of sending them to the landfill. It feels so good to "gift" things to strangers in a way that I did not expect and a lot of the people on the site feel more like friends now that I have been doing this awhile. 

Last week my husband and I did a huge garage clean-out and as a result we had lots of items to give away. I posted them on the site and then let my intuition and The Universe decide who should receive each item. 

One of the items was a desk which we had not used in years and have no place for now or in the forseeable future. Only a couple of people were interested and when I looked at the comments I heard the name "Serena" (not her real name) and decided to gift it to her. 

I had seen her name on the site before and it sounded vaguely familiar to me, but I could not place her from her profile photo so I figured maybe I had once known somebody with a similar name.

When she came to pick up the desk I did not recognize her, but as we loaded it and chatted, I just couldn't shake the feeling that I knew her.

After everything was loaded and she and her family drove away it finally came to me: she was a former customer at a place I had worked a few years ago. And not a nice one. In fact, she had been pretty horrible to most of us who had to work with her and we had all tried our best to avoid her. 

As the memories came flooding back, I also remembered that her husband had seemed like a pretty mean guy back then whenever anyone had to interact with him. While loading the desk into the car, he had not said a word to me or looked at me or introduced himself to me, which was weird for this group. 

For a split second I regretted that I had given the desk to her. Why should I give something to someone who was so mean to me? Her mere presence in the office back then had changed the energy of the place, and not for the better. 

In the next second, however, something shifted, and I was grateful to have given her the desk. 

I was grateful that I hadn't recognized her and that I had been kind to her, because when I really thought about it I wasn't hurting anymore from what she had done. In fact, I had completely forgotten about it. It didn't have the power to touch me anymore, but I did have the power to make something positive out of that experience and perhaps to make life just a little bit better for someone I suspected was struggling quite a bit.