Accountability – Forgiveness
This post is so timely for me as I have been putting off updating my accountability page as I did really badly last week in my exercise goal. No excuses – I just got out of the habit and am now having a hard time getting back into it.
We all have times like this – when our will power is lacking or life gets in the way – and it is so easy to give ourselves a hard time over it. I am being particularly hard on myself as I feel I am letting my readers down as well as myself. So I have to do what I urge you all to do when things haven’t gone as well as they could be – lighten up! We fall down sometimes but that doesn’t mean we are now out. We just have to realign ourselves to our goals – remind ourselves of WHY we want to achieve our goals – and my why is huge – I want to stay alive to see my kids grow up and have their own kids. We forgive those we love over and over for their mistakes and we need to learn to do the same for ourselves.
Here is a wonderful quote by Maya Angelou on the subject :
“I don’t know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, ‘well, if I’d known better I’d have done better,’ that’s all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, ‘I’m sorry,’ and then you say to yourself, ‘I’m sorry.’ If we all hold on to the mistake, we can’t see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can’t see what we’re capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one’s own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that’s rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don’t have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.”
