My New Year's Resolution: I will write something every single day and post it for everyone to see.
#5: Specific Gravity
I like to describe that epiphany that comes when you realize that someone has been doing something for your benefit as a "moment of gravity." It's that moment when you begin to understand just how important someone is to you and how important you are to them. It can come in many different relationships and it is a wonderful thing when it does pop up.
Most often gravity is something that parents have to look forward to in they later years. More so it's something that they can hope for when their children are no longer little. Adolescence is the point in a person's life when gravity is the furthest and most foreign thing in the world. For most teenagers humanism and hedonism are the only two lines of thought worth any heeding. Mom and Dad, as well as a select group of other adults, are opposed to anything and everything that could and ever will be fun, so it's okay to hate them openly and loudly. They are the murderers of love.
Gravity strikes like barbed lightning upon the old melon and can leave quite the mark. A tiny bit of guilt will form around the affected brain, but this is typically over-shadowed by the gross amount of appreciation that flows out from the wound.
When you are the person at the source of the gravity, it can be a wonderful feeling to simply be thanked. There were a couple of times that I found myself being thanked for things that I had no intention of receiving such gratitude for. Once, I stayed behind to help clean up a friend's house for a party they were going to throw while everyone else went out to the fair. About a month later a friend who had gone to the fair realized what I had done and thanked me for it. Another, more serious instance came when a good friend realized how lucky he was that I didn't react negatively when he, for all intents and purposes, stabbed me in the back. I have in no way forgotten what he did to me, nor will I ever, but I have forgiven him.
One of the greatest things I ever learned in my years of college is the idea that "forgive and forget" is wrong. When you forget something, your act of forgiveness is worthless because it doesn't take any effort to forgive someone for something you no longer bother to remember. When it is something that you cannot forget, that is always at your recall, that is when forgiveness is important. Forgiveness isn't just loving certain aspects of someone and disregarding the rest of them. Forgiveness is loving someone despite everything else, not simply overlooking a few details.
"Warts and all."
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