I have been dreading the upcoming 10th anniversary of 9/11.
It’s been a persistent yet odd feeling. Like most Americans, I experienced 9/11 as a profound national tragedy, but not a specific personal one. I refused to pay much attention in previous anniversaries, deflecting conversation or switching the channel. But this one has been nagging at me. Maybe because I now live in a city that was part of the attacks. Maybe because I now have kids. Maybe because, however arbitrarily, numbers ending in zero mean something in this culture of ours and so, subconsciously, it means something to me. Maybe because I am a lifetime away from who I was in 2001, yet the events of those day are still very present.
Regardless.
It’s distracting, distressing, dismaying me: the ongoing coverage, the co-workers stories, the mentions even in the most innocuous of places. It’s eating me up. I have to do something about it.
I think, cautiously, crazily, that what I hafta do about it is, cautiously, crazily, begin the path to forgiveness.
The Prep Stuff
First, let’s address all these vacuous connotations of the word “forgive.” It’s frequently synonymous with the phrase “let go,” an act defined not with a strong grip but an open shrug. Separate “forgive” into its two syllables, keep the “give,” swap out “for” for another preposition, switch the order, and you get: “Give Up.”
An act of weakness, of last resort: this is the reputation of forgiveness.
So the first thing to realize is that, in order to achieve forgiveness, it actually takes quite a bit of very hard, very active work. Forgiveness is the most difficult emotional act a person can take. It is the Ironman of the Soul. And it takes just as much work to do it.
Seek Stability.
It’s difficult to train for a triathalon if you don’t have the stable structure elsewhere in your life that allows you to nourish yourself, stay medically healthy, get proper rest time. Same is true for forgiveness, but here you have to nourish your psyche.
Eat well. Go to the gym. Go to church. Meditate. See a counselor. Be kind to your family. Plant a garden. Harvest a garden. Make art. Do the things that have been shown time and again to make us happier. Build up your confidence and sense of self-peace so that you have a stable emotional platform to stand on when you begin the hard emotional journey of forgiveness.
Seek Space
An extension of the above: sometimes you need the time to put all that good structure into place before you can tackle forgiveness. Go ahead and do it. You’ll know when it’s time to come back to it all.
Seek Possibility
The first action toward forgiveness is just imaginging that it’s an option to begin with.
The idea of forgiving the hijackers who have struck deep blows to our collective identity, to our personal understanding of life, to our economic reality, is, quite frankly, crazy-talk. It’s impossible. It’s inconceivable. It’s nutso.
But having said it, having written it down, it’s already out there. The mere act of recognizing it’s a potential action, however far down the road, moves forgiveness from the land of impossible to merely improbable.
The Jumping-In Stuff
Seek Your Relief.
Forgiveness isn’t about letting the other guy get away with it. It’s about relieving your own pain. Yes, “Making it better for ME” is a selfish reason to forgive. But this is a marathon we’re running plus five miles we’re swimming plus a jillion miles we’re sitting on an uncomfortable seat that gives new meaning to the phrase “riding up.” At the beginning, let’s go easy on ourselves. We have to start somewhere.
Make a commitment to yourself to do what you have to do to feel better. Forgiveness is for you and not for anyone else. No one else even has to know about your decision. –Cancer Supportive Care
Seek Your Power
None of us can control the acts of aggression or pain or violence committed against us. We can’t force people to act gently toward us. They will act as they will.
What is in our power, what is in our control, is how we respond. Choose to hold to the anger or choose to let it go. Whichever way, recognize that this decision is not up to the perpetrator. It’s up to you.
Seek Your Beauty
What’s more impossible to conceive than the idea of forgiveness is that fact that, while we reel in anguish, around us the flowers still bloom, babies still coo, lovers still kiss.
But all these things do still happen.
Look for them:
Instead of focusing on your wounded feelings, and thereby giving the person who caused you pain power over you, learn to look for the love, beauty and kindness around you. –Cancer Supportive Care
(Special tip: Dance parties wherein one joins an under-5 age group in getting on the floor and rolling around, and occasionally right over each other, has been proven to be particularly helpful. I have done extensive empirical experiments and can vouch for the effectiveness of this technique.)
The Hard Stuff
Seek to Know: Part 1
Often the word “forgive” is paired with the word “forget”, as if the absence of knowledge is what enables a person to actively let go of pain. In fact it can be just the opposite. Knowing builds understanding, understanding builds empathy, empathy builds the desire to connect to our humanity. And the strongest way to connect to our humanity is to forgive.
For eight years, I have been avoiding Tom Junod’s award winning article “Falling Man” about a heart-rending picture that I don’t have the strength to post here on my own, personal blog (though it is in the above link). But I finally read the article. Junod writes about the victims who chose their own path to death on 9/11 by leaping from the highest floors of the World Trade Center. Junod writes about how they hurtled down so fast that their shoes ripped off and their clothes tore to shreds. Junod writes about the families of victims, who refused to believe their loved ones could have made a suicidal choice. And Junod writes that the rest of us, unable to acknowledge these jumpers, to learn about them or even look at their pictures, did both them and us a disservice:
[W]e, as patriotic Americans, have agreed not to look at [pictures of the 9/11 jumpers]. Dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of people died by leaping from a burning building, and we have somehow taken it upon ourselves to deem their deaths unworthy of witness — because we have somehow deemed the act of witness, in this one regard, unworthy of us.
Our desire to move past the pain is not helped by pushing aside the most awful aspects of the day. Nor is seeking that knowledge a morbid can’t-look-away type of quest. It’s bearing witness. It’s acknowledging what was, and what is.
Seek to Know: Part 2
Actual knowledge of the jumpers has been dismissed with furious whispers, but no such censurious response has been prompted with another group, for the simple fact that no one has even imagined their stories deserve to be told: the hijackers themselves.
Repeatedly in the last several days, we have heard many personalized stories: dozens, hundreds, thousands of stories featuring a named victim, a named hero, a named survivor. Each of them are individuals, with back-stories and missed-chances and loved-ones.
The hijackers are lumped together: one homogeneous group of evil. In our remembrances, our exhibitions, our documentaries, they are not named. For, one could argue, very good reason. Myself, I barely have the emotional strength to hear the thousands of stories of the victims. I can’t begin to conceptualize learning about the criminals themselves.
This was, however, precisely what Bud Welch did. His daughter, Julie, died in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. And Bud, purposefully, deliberately, sought information about Timothy McVeigh. He sought knowledge that could lead him to forgiveness. From Michael McCullough, author of lots of forgiveness books, in an interview with Krista Tippett:
[Bud Welch] actually sought out Timothy McVeigh’s father and visited him one day at the McVeigh home and had this moment he describes when he saw Timothy’s picture on the mantle. It was a high school graduation picture. And they were just making small talk and Bud said to McVeigh’s father, he said, “God, that’s a good-looking kid.” And the tears just began pouring out of the elder McVeigh. And what he realized then was that here was another father on the verge of losing a son, of losing a child. And that immediate experience of sympathy and compassion went a tremendous way in facilitating the forgiveness process for Bud.
To gain that knowledge, to know the back-stories and missed-chances and loved-ones of the hijackers, that might not bring any reduction of pain. But it just might bring a way to move beyond it.
Seek Acceptance.
When the fear and the anger and the fury and the sadness and the shame and the horror well up in our guts, there are three courses of action to deal with all this emotion. Like all of us, I usually fall into one of the first two:
Bury — Completely squash down the emotion. What emotion? I don’t see any of that silly stuff here. No way. No how. No bugging me about it because then it might EXPLODE OUT OF ME AND THEN YOU’LL BE SORRY YOU PUSHED ME HERE.
At which point you:
Clutch — Hold fiercely on to my emotion, the emotion that justifies the tantrums and the tears. Hold on to the identity of victim. Hold on to the identity of being more hurt than anyone else. Hold on to the identity of being pitied and prayed for.
But there’s a third way:
Acknowledge – As far as I understand, this is what the Soul Triathletes among us do when that emotion wells up: Pause. Look at it. Do nothing more than say: Oh. Hey there.
Look, but don’t define, don’t analyze, don’t resist. Even attempting to name the emotion can spiral off: This is Anger, or this is Sadness, or this is Some Mix of Anger and Sadness; and suddenly giving it a name has changed the nature of the emotion itself, and changed how you handle it: “I’m pushing aside this anger.” “I just need to be sad.” The objective word in those sentences is “I.” The only thing served in those thoughts is the ego.
For me, I have only accomplished this rarely, and only in the most mild of circumstances. But I’ve glimpsed enough to know that it’s possible.
The question is whether it’s possible with 9/11.
Seek Non-Hate.
An extension of acceptance, but an important one. After riding through the waves of fury and sadness, the forgiver can actively seek to feel neutral. James Altucher calls this Non-Hate, which only goes to show how rarely we all ever pursue this course of action: we don’t even have a positive word for it. My college drama professor would rank Non-Hate up with other completely unactable pursuits, like Non-Staying and Non-Studying and Non-Surfing. It’s extremely difficult to non-act. So much so that, as of now, we don’t even have a word to describe that neutral course, that calming down, that stabilizing of emotion that we want to achieve:
Everytime you are thinking about someone on your list, try to catch yourself. This is the hard part. Stop yourself for just a second in the middle of your mental maze of anguish. Label the thought you were thinking “useful” or “not useful”. If someone shat on my face and now I’m thinking about my mental argument wth him or her. This is “not useful”. If you label enough thoughts “not useful” then “Intense” anger might turn into “Moderate” anger. “Moderate” anger might turn into “Mild” anger. This is how you cultivate non-hate instead of compassion. –James Altucher
Act Negately. Negately Act.It sounds so difficult as to be rather silly. And yet there is one final path, one final stage of forgiveness that far surpasses even the most conceptually difficult Non Act.
The Impossible Stuff
Seek Love.
I can think of a handful of folks who could probably see the events of 9/11, look at those 19 men, and not merely Non-Hate, but actively Love. Not coincidently, all are considered, in some part of the world, to be divine.
Jesus, say, who’d turn his cheek. Muhammed, who was among the first, in the midst of war, to practice nonviolence. Or Buddha, who’d accept the hijackers with the deepest of love. But then Buddha is a god.
I most definitely am not a god.
Look, I can easily forgive my toddler when I get an accidental elbow to the nose. I can slightly-less-easily forgive my baby when I get a deliberate whack to the shins. I can grudgingly forgive the stranger who accidentally blows cigarette smoke in my face. But I cannot yet forgive the hijackers. I cannot begin to think that I would look at them and possibly feel anything remotely close to “love.”
I think this just makes me human.
It definitely makes me normal.
Still, all through this week, all through this weekend, we have heard and will continue to hear questions of time: When’s it gonna be time to have the memorial open? When’s it gonna be time to leave Afghanistan? When’s it gonna be time to completely rebuild?
For me, and maybe for all of us, perhaps it’s time to also ask:
When’s it gonna be time to forgive?
