There’s a story about the Roman senator, Cato, one of the most impressive humans of all time.
One day, he was struck in public, and after the fight was broken up, Cato refused to ask for an apology from his assailant.
“I don’t even remember being hit,” he said.
I don’t think this is just a charitable, nice and forgiving guy, someone who understands that humans will err and forgives them their sins, saying this. There’s much more than that.
Mental Baggage
Every time we think about someone, we add them to our mental baggage.
It’s like renting an apartment out. You give up space in your mind when you add someone to your thoughts.
You give up space in your apartment to a tenant, and in return he pays you money. A fair transaction.
Perhaps it might not be money, but there would be some benefit you’d get. It could be done for love or friendship – so people often share their home with friends or family.
But what if you rented your home out and gave up space, but didn’t get anything at all for it? That makes no sense.
Yet that’s exactly what we do when we nurture sentiments like anger, envy or malice against others.
They’re living rent-free in our head. They don’t offer us anything – in fact, we feel far worse – yet we go on thinking about them. It’s like a landlord paying the tenant instead of getting money from him.
Ceding Power
We give these people power over us – they are the focus of our thoughts, their actions are the reason we feel envy or anger or whatever.
It shows how easy it is to trigger us, to disrupt our mental rhythm. You’ll find it much harder to concentrate on anything if you’re preoccupied thinking about how someone wronged you.
It’s also a sign that you have nothing better in your life to do than obsess over another human being – particularly one you don’t like.
The best revenge is to get on with your life, and not give them this power over you.
It’s in our self-interest to forgive and move on.
A random nobody who’s frustrated enough to punch someone probably wasn’t worth the time and effort for Cato to spend his mental energy on – and so he moved on.
I’m sure that’s why Cato did what he did – not because he was a really nice and forgiving guy, but because he always had his sights on what mattered to him most.