Every one of us has people in our lives that we eventually have conflict or difficulty with. I think all of us have these moments or people we don’t get along with. It’s really easy to take a big broad brush and paint them one colour and that’s their colour. Like sticking them in a box. But it’s never that simple. There’s always more there.
I have examples of that in my own family. When you find out that someone in your family has done terrible things and yet it’s someone that you love, you do end up looking at that in a different way. You may say, “OK this person isn’t all good.” It also means that no one is ever all bad. It does make us look at humanity in a different way, in all its complexities.
Recently I worked on a project with someone and what a wonderful project it was. We were putting together this person’s life story. As a writer it was really nice to be there to help this person. At one point I was saying, “What happened here? Your mom must have done this. Your dad must have done that.” The person I was collaborating with said, “Gee I never thought about it.” Because things that had happened when they were younger, as a young person or as a child, they had just come up with a conclusion and left it there for all those decades as if “That must have been what happened.” Looking back allowed us to see a different picture and allowed this person to see her parents in a different way. Sometimes we have confrontations or conflicts with parents and it isn’t black and white. Any one who is a parent knows that sometimes you make decisions you know your kids are not going to like but in the end they are better for them. In the beginning you can even say, “It is going to be good for my child to suffer a little bit now rather than a lot later.” It is a parent’s responsibility to apply structure and discipline to their children’s lives.
This film that I watched, The Reader, was so wonderful because it did make me think and I’m still thinking. I think empathy is the way to forgiveness and I think forgiveness is the way to Love.