The Possibility of Possibility

There was a time in my life when I had made up my mind about my father. And I had made it up good and solid, the way we sometimes do when the hurt has settled so deeply into our bones that we can no longer tell where the pain ends and we begin.

He had caused us great suffering. And I was not about to let him off the hook. I had come to believe that forgiveness was somehow a betrayal of all that had happened, that if I were to loosen my grip on the anger, even a little, it might suggest that what he had done was somehow acceptable.

And it wasn’t.

So I held on. Not because I enjoyed the anger, but because I believed it was something I owed to the truth.

Then one day, after meditation, a rather peculiar thought came to me.

Would you be open to the possibility that it might be possible, that there could possibly be a possibility, that you might someday consider the possibility of finding some kind of resolve? Not today, mind you. Just the possibility that it might be possible.

Well, I thought, when you put it that way.

I wasn’t being asked to forgive him. Or understand him. Or even like him. I was merely being asked whether I would consider the possibility that something I had declared impossible might not be.

And really, what was the harm in that?

So I said yes.

Yes, I would be open to the possibility that it might be possible.

And then, just like that, another word arrived.

Compassion.

Oh, damn.

Of all the words in the great wide universe, it had to be that one.

I didn’t want compassion for my father. I wanted justice. I wanted him to understand the wounds he had left behind. I wanted the past to have been different.

But there was that word, sitting quietly in the middle of my thoughts, asking nothing of me except that I allow it to stay.

So I did.

And slowly I began to wonder about the man behind the father. The life he had lived before I ever knew him. The suffering he might have carried, the dreams he had chased, the disappointments that had shaped him. A man whose own life ended just as some of those dreams were finally coming to fruition.

What must have happened to a soul that it could inflict such suffering upon the very people it loved?

I began to see that compassion did not require me to excuse his actions. It simply asked me to recognize that he, too, was a human being moving through this life, carrying the consequences of things I might never understand.

In the wisdom of yoga, we are reminded that beneath all our confusion, our failings, and the countless roles we play, there is something sacred within every living being. Even those who have hurt us. Even those we cannot bring ourselves to forgive.

Could I recognize that sacredness in my father?

No.

Not that day.

But perhaps I could be open to the possibility that one day I might.

And that was enough.

Many years have passed since that meditation. Somewhere along the way, without any grand announcement or miraculous moment, compassion began doing its quiet work. The anger loosened. The story I had told myself about my father became larger, with room for things I had never considered.

The past did not change. But something in me did.

I no longer needed to make him innocent in order to see him as human.

And perhaps that is one of life’s greatest lessons. We are not always required to forgive, to accept, or to understand. Sometimes we are only asked to leave a tiny opening in the door we have so firmly closed.

Because the impossible has a curious way of becoming possible when we stop insisting that it cannot.

And who knows what might find its way through that little opening?

Perhaps even compassion.

Hari Om Tat Sat