COLUMNIST: Wit & Wisdom

He tells about a pair of Buddhist monks walking along a riverbank one day when they came upon a woman standing there distressed and crying.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked one. She said she couldn’t cross the river to her infant son, who needed her, so he picked her up and, putting her on his shoulders, carried her across the river to her child.

She thanked him profusely and they continued their journey.

Some time later the monk who took no part in helping the lady said: ‘You picked that lady up and carried her across the river. You know that as monks, we are not permitted to do that’.

The other one replied: ‘I set that lady down an hour ago, and you’re still carrying her’.

There are chains that tie us to some event in the past, robbing us of our freedom.When we harbour bitterness and unforgiveness they gnaw at us, but we can break those chains by acknowledging them and choosing to let them go.

Therein is freedom.

Quite apart from the rights and wrongs of recent circumstances in the US, we’re likely to see the effects of this on President Trump in the coming weeks and months.

Rather than viewing with gratitude the excitement and achievements of the four years he occupied the highest office on the planet, his attitude to the events surrounding his election defeat will eat at him and embitter him, perhaps for the rest of his life, while the world moves on - unless he can let it go.

In March, 1986, a woman named Jill Saward, then aged 21, was in her father’s home, a vicarage in Ealing, when robbers burst in, tied up her father and her boyfriend and beat them, fracturing their skulls, while she was raped.

She was the first rape victim in the UK to waive her right to anonymity and I listened to her as she talked bravely about her trauma.

What struck me were the comments she made about forgiveness.

Even as a girl in her early 20s she understood that if she made room in her life for unforgiveness it would hurt no-one but herself.

The perpetrators would be getting along with their lives while she would become old, twisted and gnarled. Let’s not allow something in our past to cast its long shadow over our future. Let it go.

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