“Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge” -Scott Adams

A lot of you who know me personally or are close readers of my infrequent entries here know that I’m something of an aspiring Buddhist. Not that I figure I’ll ever be a devout follower of anything (except, probably, my family), but I do like a lot of what people who know a lot more than I do think and say about ways to live my life.

A central tenet I’ve discovered is the idea of acceptance, that I think is best described in this little snippet I’m stealing from somewhere:

That thing that’s bothering you, can you change it?

If you can, change it!
If you can’t, leave it alone!

As my wife will be more than happy to tell you, I am known to hold a grudge. A while. A long, long while. Until recently, those guys who made my life in high school a living hell were in some serious unknown danger, as were the people like that from junior high school, various ex-bosses and ex-friends and even the strangers who cut me off in traffic. Encroaching age (and it’s strangely accompanying wisdom), having kids, pharmacopics and this damned Buddha thing have all helped me to be less likely to be thrown into an all-encompassing funk when I’m newly wronged or remember past slights.

But I’m not eternally vigilant and sometimes things slip into my newly enlightened field of vision.

Yesterday I was driving downtown in the mid-afternoon and I saw an ex-pals’ car – a flashy convertible – parked on a downtown street. Jarred, I spent a few minutes pondering and hoping this indicated some sort of horrible fate. A divorce, perhaps, or the sudden need to find a new job because of an abrupt termination.

The thoughts fueled me as I sweated on the exercycle on the gym, aided by the gym TV, eternally displaying the idiocy of Faux News (really, does anybody but them refer to people as homicide bombers?).

My exercise finished, I got in the van and drove back home. The car was there still.

I pulled to the side of the road and pondered for a moment, then I climbed out of my van, walked across the street, glanced around to make sure the street was thoroughly deserted, unzipped my pants and voided my bladder onto the drivers’ seat. I sure had gulped down a lot of water in preparation for my sweaty workout.

So there you go. Rather than harbor a lot of unresolvable rage, I emptied two things from my body at once, and I felt better all over.

Did I really do that? I dunno. As my friend Dane and I have discussed over and over again in the past decades, reality is so subjective…all I know is that writing it all down makes me feel even better.

“A man need never revenge himself, the body of his enemy will be brought to his own door”
-Chinese proverb