The Key to Freedom

The mainstream media tends to focus on the cruelty of individuals and people. Often rightfully, as they can serve as a warning. But it is equally important to focus on positive examples of people whose extraordinary traits and constructive ways of coping with life’s challenges can’t be mentioned often enough. They are like a bright guiding light in the dark ocean of prejudices, discrimination, hate, and bitterness.

When Nelson Mandela who was kept in prison for about 27 years for fighting for justice and freedom was asked if he hates his oppressors, his answer was:

Now, what is the meaning of that? If you have ever met people who experienced tremendous loss or cruelty, maybe, God forbid, you are one of them, you know that there are basically two ways of coping:

We all carry our own emotional packages. Maybe life has already taught us that holding a grudge against someone isn’t healthy, and it’s definitely not the road to happiness and self-empowerment. Quite the opposite, instead. It’s like a poisonous weed that grows inside of us, destroying not only our past but our present and future as well.

“You will not have my hate,” wrote Antoine Leiris as part of the message to those who were responsible for the 2015 Paris attacks that killed his wife, Hélène. (An excerpt of his book you may find on: https://medium.com/@penguinpress/on-november-13th-2015-they-took-his-wife-now-he-tells-his-story-bd493e13b52f. )

It is the same spirit with which Nelson Mandela refused to give in to hate while continuing to struggle for freedom. One is the fight with the oppressor, and the other one is the fight with ourselves. A fight, we can only win if we don’t choose the seemingly easier way and therefore finally completely lose to those who try to harm and destroy us.

This is another statement (I paraphrased) I often heard in countries shaken by terrorism, war, crime, and violence almost on a daily basis.

It is an attitude that is worth adopting because what aggressors and oppressors really want is to destroy our spirit. Maybe they can take our loved ones, our career, our property, our reputation, and our wealth. Maybe we are not in the position or place to stop them. The only power we have is the power over our minds, hearts, and souls. If we are able to protect those, they won’t be able to kill what is essential and unique to us: Our Spirit.

I was often wondering about the concept of forgiveness proclaimed by so many religions. And I encountered numerous sects, fanatic groups, and individuals around the globe who used this concept consciously and calculatingly, committing cruel acts and abuse toward those depending on them. In a nutshell, they were counting on the forgiveness of those they oppressed because, after all, this was a requirement to be closer to God and to be part of the respective self-declared divine group or cult.

It is instead:

From this angle, forgiveness really isn’t so much about the acquittal of aggressors and oppressors. It is first and foremost a way to help ourselves and to opt against that poisonous seed that otherwise will grow like an uncontrollable weed inside of us and will take our hope, our joy, our love, and our freedom away. We become prisoners of our hate, and our bitterness as we keep clinging to treasured moments long gone while denying ourselves any kind of happiness in the present and in the future.

Life is given to us as a gift. And our gift back is to live it to the fullest as free, empowered, graceful human beings, and, in case we lost people we loved, to live it for them as well.

💙 Thank you for reading ! 💙

Related posts:

My Filipino American journey as a privileged Brown Asian immigrant

As compared to standard product development projects, corporate innovation projects follow fundamentally different approaches and have different goals — they also require different metrics for…

The impact of mobile technology on gambling If there is one trend that can be seen all over the world, it is the rise of mobile technology. With the huge selection of apps for mobile devices, users…