"Courtney is Forgiving"

we are doing a virtue development project in my ethics class for the remainder of the semester, but i'm not sure how much i believe in an assigned development of virtue. shouldn't trying to develop a particular virtue be a personal choice, not something you are told to do for a grade? i know personally, the minute i'm told i have to do something in a particular way with certain time restraints, it automatically decreases my desire to do it.

and can you truly isolate a single virtue and improve that in your life? i'm not so sure. because i think the virtues are so intertwined that you can't just pull one away from the rest and say "i'm going to work on increasing this one virtue in my life." this is all based on some personal experiment that Ben Franklin did with a list of what he believed were the cardinal virtues and he worked to develop all of them in himself. But even he found that he forgot some in his list, one in particular that was most definitely related to all the rest - humility. i'm not saying its not in your powers to make yourself a better person - that is always an option - but i feel the minute you try and isolate an option, you see how many strings it really has attached to it.

i won't argue that this assignment hasn't made me think, although i can't speak for the rest of the class (where the minimal seems to be the best option). obviously my deemed virtue of development is forgiveness because i do tend to have a hard time with holding grudges for longer than necessary sometimes. we're supposed to deal with developing this on a day to day basis, but i don't always have issues with forgiveness daily, so its made it a little harder. but then i realized...maybe i'm looking at it the wrong way. it's not that i have to wait for the day when i get mad at someone and test myself on letting it go. it can be when i feel animosity about something that has happened in my past that i haven't been able to let go of. that's what i have a bigger problem with.

forgiveness is a hard concept. to define and to incorporate into your life. at least for me. the dictionary definition is along the lines of "stopping a feeling of resentment toward a person or thing," but we've all heard the saying, "it isn't as easy as just stopping." when somebody hurts you in a way that you never believed was possible and acts in ways that are not ever considered acceptable, how do you just stop being upset about it? i've told people that i've forgiven them for things when in all actuality i'm not really sure that i have.

so i've changed the goal of this assignment for myself. before i can work on developing forgiveness in myself, i must first understand what it means to forgive. once i learn the "what," i can then begin to learn the "how."

"Forgive all who have offended you, not for them, but for yourself."

-Harriet Nelson