Developing Forgiveness
And so, the story goes like this: once upon a time a person was walking in a park and a pigeon pooped on him.
“Aaaargh, the pigeon pooped me!”, the person cried in anger.
His new shirt was ruined! How did the pigeon dare?! No, really, how did the pidgeon dare?! If he only had a nuke in that moment!
But instead, our friend was into meditation and alike and immediately felt ashamed of all that anger, and so as per washing out his shame he quickly tossed, “Pigeon I forgive you!”.
But something strange happened.
Despite he used the magic word “forgive”, he still felt angry.
Days, months, years passed by, but the pigeon poop was still there! I mean, It was ages that was gone by his shirt, nevertheless, the pigeon poop was stuck in his life making him feel so angry.
The situation was desperate, a life ruined by pigeon poop.
So, it happens to be that our friend had a particular friend. This particular friend was a little eccentric but respected and trusted by everyone and all the people he knew talked to this friend to resolve troubles of any kind.
One day he even got curious and asked this particular friend what was exactly his job as he thought that had to be some sort of charity or alike.
Surprisingly, the friend of our friend replied he was only working as a Software Developer.
A Software Developer…
He didn’t know what a Software Developer did exactly, but he was so desperate with the pigeon poop that he decided to give it a try.
“I see. Some bugfixing and a gentle kill -9 will do”, said the Software Developer friend after hearing the story.
That phrase didn’t make any sense at all.
“You see, I write programs all day and sometimes some of them have errors and get stuck. That’s called a bug. Now, it may happen that when the program gets stuck it uses all the CPU for doing nothing! The worst is you can not use your machine to do anything else!”.
“And what do you do when a program gets stuck and it uses all the CPU for doing nothing?! You stop it! That’s where kill -9 gets handy.”
“Now, I know you may feel reluctant about having the destiny of your machine and your life in the hands of a program called kill but fear not.
kill -9 only sends messages to the programs.
A stop message to be precise, that’s it.”
“I think it’s the same with your pigeon poop, you know?! The poop got stuck in your life and now is wasting all your resources. But you know that already.”
“The issue is with the fix you proposed. You “tossed” an ‘I forgive you’ to the pigeon as the problem was with the pigeon. But it wasn’t. The problem was, and still is, with the anger process in your head and you need a kill -9 now to stop it!”
“Now, the question is, how do you talk to your processes in your head? And even more important would be, how do you change a process in your head?”
To be continued…