Why is it so much easier to forgive others than ourselves?
“We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.” — Cyril Connolly
“If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.” — Jack Kornfield.
When a friend makes a serious mistake, most of us find a way to hold it with some nuance. We factor in their circumstances, intentions, and patterns of behavior over time. We do not reduce them to the worst thing they have done.
We extend the kind of understanding that relationships make natural.
We do not do this for ourselves. When we make the same kind of mistake, we treat it as evidence, not as a moment in a life, but as a revelation of the life’s essential character. The error becomes proof of something we were already half-convinced of.
Simone Weil wrote about attention as a form of love: the willingness to look at a thing, including a person, as it actually is, rather than as a screen for your projections.
Most of us never turn that quality of attention on ourselves. We look in and immediately begin prosecuting.
The self-prosecution is not entirely irrational. We hold ourselves to a higher standard because we had access to our intentions in a way others did not. We knew better, or thought we did, and we still got it wrong. I think most of the time it’s unfair.
There is a difference between taking something seriously and flagellating yourself with it indefinitely. The first is useful, but the second is a way of avoiding the harder work of changing by substituting suffering for it.
You would tell a friend to be gentler with themselves, so why don’t you take your own advice?
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