The Road to a Happier Life: Part 1 - You Mad or Nah?

Could you forgive someone who cheated on you? Or better yet - could you forgive someone who hurt your family (God forbid)? As impossible as it may sound, there are people who have. To others, they could never imagine doing such a thing to someone who cut them so deeply - and I don’t blame them. The crazy thing is, despite knowing why forgiveness is important, I still find it difficult to answer those questions. Forgiveness has to be one of the toughest challenges in life - right up there with patience, staying awake in late night 2.5 hour class, and dieting. But it is also one of the factors of life that hold most of us back. Absolving someone of the wrong they did you - relieving yourself of that resentment, anger, and even hatred you may feel toward them - though hard, is the best thing you could do for yourself. You may think removing that person from your life completely is the best decision you could make for the benefit of your future - but you’d be wrong. Although it may feel like the right decision now, it is only going to create a void within you that will only give way to sadness, and overall, an empty feeling inside. You may not notice it, or understand where it is coming from, but more often than not, that void is created because of these kinds of situations - situations where we just can not let go of what someone has done to us. But what we fail to realize is that in the end, we are only hurting ourselves.