Forget or Forgive......

“I do not forget but forgive"
"I never forgive but I forget"
"I neither forget nor forgive"

You must have heard all these trash dialogues from your friends many times as if they actually follow it and I guess you must have uttered it yourself at times to express the strength and tenacity of your character. But the question that I am pondering upon is that do we actually mean it when we say it or these statements are just temporary expression of aggression??

And what's the best thing to do. To forget or to forgive or neither or both. What I think is when we use the term 'forget' we are concerned primarily upon the situation that is troubling us and when we talk about the term 'forgive' we are concerned about the person whose act is bothering us. We are brought up with all the bookish statement of ' forget and forgive’, one must have big heart to forgive, we must forget things and move on and other such things. Often I am described as a person who never forgets anything and never forgives anyone. People around me suggest forgetting things, forgiving some people and forget all the things they have done to me. They describe this as a key to a happy and peaceful life. They think one can't enjoy life when one has lots of burden and weight of past.

I never agreed with these thoughts and I think I won't ever. As in a standard software procedure, a record of previous errors and what caused that error is always kept so that it could be avoided later and I follow the same procedure. If we forget anything then we would be prone to get hurt by it again and if we forgive someone then often we are taken for granted and that person took it as weakness of our character and considers it as our inability to take strong actions. What's the sense of getting taken for granted and giving other the chance of hurting us again and again? Desperate time requires desperate measures and at times the best measure is to isolate someone from our life completely so that person would never have the chance to bother us again.

 And if we forget a situation then there is a high probability that situation would repeat itself. Then the same old procedure, we would cry, would hear sad songs, talk  same things to same persons and get same reactions from them, update some Facebook statuses,share some 'strong message' pics on Facebook, make some internal resolution of how to avoid it next time but in the end we fall in the same pit again as we never bothered to watch our path every time we fall.

My above views may be interpreted negatively (as it always happens). I am not saying to be cold, rude and completely isolated. What I am trying to say is that some things we must keep in our mind to save ourselves from inconvenience. Giving chances is a good thing because at times we also need some chances. There are some mistakes that can't be avoided, some misunderstandings that have to be cleared, some gaps that have to be filled but we must keep an eye on the frequency of chances we give to people otherwise some people have the tendency to make a habit of making mistakes. Some bridges are to be burned else we would always reach the position we started.

Anyway I guess there can't be a universally accepted generalize principle on it. Sometimes you have to forget things and move on sometimes you shouldn't even if you could. Sometimes you have to forgive some people but do not forget what they did but giving chances is the best thing you can do in such situation. Sometimes you just shouldn't forgive a person and the best thing would be to forget his existence in your life completely otherwise that person will continue to give you troubles. So one has to use his conscience to decide in a long run what would be the best thing to do but some tough decisions should be made at the right time for a happy and peaceful life. There is no benefit in bragging about having a big heart and forgiving and forgetting just for the sake of ' as its a good thing to do ' !!!