The gift of mercy?

When was the last time you gave someone the gift of mercy, when did you show compassion and forgiveness to someone who you could punish or hurt, even when they absolutely deserved to pay the price for their actions. It is not a concept that I have given much thought as I did not feel that I had or wanted that much power over other people, it seems to be something that judges and politicians had to worry about, however sometimes a word pops up in your life repeatedly like it is despair for your attention which forces you contemplate it. Once you do, it is hard to avoid being hit by it's importance even in everyday sorts of actions, that it is possible to have mercy in your actions even when you do not have power, that it is possible to hold it in your opinions, personal judgements and responses to others, and carry it like a present that you wish to give away at every opportunity.

It is too easy to dismiss other people without mercy, to see their actions and simplified them into the two camps of good and evil. By deciding that they are bad instead of looking at them as complex being we lose something as well, we simplified ourselves and our action, when the truth is that everyone is capable of being motivated by fear, that all actions come form either love or fear, that they can make mistakes and say things that they do not mean, unthinking statements that have meaning beyond what they actually meant. When we reduce people to binary statements of good and evil, we lose sight of their human being, that they are learning and growing, just as we are doing, it is mercy that is the key to seeing them as a whole rather than reducing them to a single action, and that is a habit worth having and practicing.

This is even easier to do with people you do not know, if you read the news there are plenty of people that you can decide deserve no mercy, that are utterly beyond the pale and have pasted the point of no return. There are ideas that offend, that surely must only come from the minds of those who are corrupt, wick and evil, self-serving ego maniacs that have the weight of karmic law waiting to drop upon their heads and whilst you might not have the power to release those punishments, you would certainly support them being judged and them receiving the full consequences of justice. You would not be alone in never considering the value of mercy in such a situation, why do they deserve mercy when they have so little of it themselves.

However mercy has to start somewhere, someone has to be the first to give it, to search for it's existence and bring it back to civilised society, good, polite customs have to fought for and repeatedly reintroduced by mercy, it is the great reset, the chance to start again as we mean to continue. The economists even account for it, value it in game theory and they are not famous for their mercy, in the situation where people can work together and they both get a share of the pie, or one can betray the other and the betrayer gets all the pie, or they can betray each other and no one gets the pie. The optimal strategy for winning depends on whether you play the game once, or keep on playing it repeatedly (and life is a repeating game), in this situation it makes sense to share but what is interesting is what happens if they betrays you, you could decide that once someone betrays you, you will always betray the other player in return, which would be a world without mercy, but what they found was that this was not optimal as you would never have pie again, what was sensible to punish them once but then you should show mercy and go back again to sharing, mercy has economic sense.

While this might be dry theory, imagine if you never showed mercy, one strike and you are out, you never get to share again, there is no coming back, you are punished forever, and then apply it to yourself. We have all made bad choices in life, mistakes, things that we would not do again given the chance, do you deserve life without mercy because that is what so many of us do, we judge ourselves for life, we decide we are a certain sort of person, unlovable, unlikeable, mean, greedy, and that is patently not true. We are all worthy, we all have self-worth (and it is the same amount as anyone else), we are especially worthy of mercy, forgiveness and we do not need to harm ourselves, we can give ourselves compassion, we are not perfect and we should not be punished for being imperfect.

Though mercy does not happen by accident, it has to be prastised, and whether you show yourself mercy so that you can give other people the gift of mercy, or the other way round if you find it easier to give to other mercy and then work up to give yourself mercy, it does not matter as it is a wonderful roundabout where the muscle of mercy is strengthen and improve. When you start looking for opportunities to give mercy in your actions, judgements and opinions, when you realise how lacking that quality of mercy has been in your life, it is easy to be blind to that quality, that extra dimension that you just did not see because you thought that you needed power in order to give mercy, and yet once it is there, you realise that the weak hold that power as much as the powerful. Often the powerful have even more to forgive, have more need of that mercy and less of it to give, whilst the weak have an abundance of mercy within their hands and have just failed to offer it to those who need it the most.

And it is worth asking who has the most power over your life, it is not others, it is not presidents, bloggers or media stars, not your parents, friends or boss, the most powerful person in your life is you, you have the greatest control over your life experience, decisions and outcomes. That weak part of you, the part who is suffering because of your power to decide it's fate, that is the part that can show you mercy towards yourself at anytime, mercy does not come from strength, it flows from the part of you that is suffering, that is in need of relief, that has to stop holding on to injustice, on to what is unfair, what is right or wrong and instead use the one thing that is always available to you, the ability to show mercy to yourself even when you do not deserve it, you always process the gift of mercy from any position in your life, so why not give yourself that gift?