Forgiveness as flex

This tree is near my house. For the three years that I’ve lived next to it, I did not notice it, until recently when my daughter pointed it out to me and now I cannot get the image out of my head.

Clearly, the tree predates the fence. Some government official must’ve decided to enclose it inside a fence. Regardless, the tree kept growing, as trees do. It must’ve found itself leaning over the fence, the fence cutting into it. It must’ve hurt. But the fence is iron, it doesn’t bend. What is the tree to do? It grows over it, around it. It subsumes the fence. Keeps growing, the weight of the tree now bending some length of the fence, almost to the point of uprooting it. It’s quite a spectacle!

Is this a picture of forgiveness, the organic and the inorganic have forgotten their battle for space and merged into each other and become one? Or is this is a picture of ultimate revenge, the gentle tree uprooting the arrogant metal? Could forgiveness and revenge two faces of the same thing?

When enough time has passed, I too find it within me to forgive. Me, the keeper of scores, the warehouse of resentments, cross-indexed alphabetically, chronologically and by damage, I too am able to let it go. But it is not time itself, it is the life and the growth that happens during that time that makes this possible. Faced with any unfavourable situation, we dig our ways through and around it and often come out the other end into freer, higher places, from where the incident in the past looks smaller. We grow bigger and taller enough that it feels like the hurt had happened to another version of ourselves, a version we have outgrown. The circumstances that were unfavourable are behind us. The people who were less than decent are in the distance too, smaller, stripped of whatever power we had once entrusted them with. It is a special kind of satisfaction to know that when they look for us, at us, they’ll need to take a step back to fit this bigger version of us in their vision.

In that little flex my hurt gives way to mild amusement. That’s the space I find forgiveness in. After I have made sense of the hurt, grown over it, with it, when I have swallowed it, made it mine. When I can fling it around, like a T Rex with meat in its mouth, like this tree, taking away any sense of agency from it. That’s when I flick my wrist and dismiss it. 

It is by no means easy, and doesn’t happen overnight. It happens slowly, invisible in the moment, unmissable in the long run. Of course, what is annoying is that we didn’t ask for it. Life was chugging along, we did not ask for another pothole, another betrayal, another chafing of the soul. We loved that naive version of ourself, this worn out version is not half as fun. The tree did not ask to lean into metal, to have to grow around the gangrene. No leaves can grow in or around that area. It changed shape because it had to, it did what it had to do to cope with the pain that won’t go away. It tells a great story but it’s not a pretty picture.

We grow over and out of our pain and our shape it different, we smile different, we love different. We’re battle scarred, but atleast we survived. Isn’t that life? Fighting for the things we want, clinging on till our nails bleed and if they still slips away, learning to live without them, to smile even.

So yes, I resent that you make me go through this, but if you do, I shall swallow it whole, chew it to bits and spit out the most fascinating stories. What’s more, I’ll be so far gone, you won’t even get to hear them. How’s that for forgiveness?