Love Keeps No Record Of Wrongs, Not Even Your Own
Love Keeps No Record Of Wrongs, Not Even Your Own
We usually read that line as an instruction about other people. Don’t keep score of what they did to you. Let it go, forgive them, release the ledger. That’s true enough as far as it goes. But it’s not the whole verse, and I don’t think it was ever meant to stop at other people. Love keeps no record of wrongs. Including the ones you committed. Including the ones you’re still committing against yourself, every single day, by refusing to close the file.
The past has an absurd amount of power over people who are convinced it’s still happening. It isn’t. Whatever it was, however vivid the memory, however sharp the shame still feels when it surfaces at two in the morning, the actual event is over. It happened, and then it stopped happening, and everything since then has been you, alone, reliving something that has no further ability to act. The past can’t do anything to you anymore. It’s not a threat. It’s a recording. It’s mute. It’s numb. It has no hands.
Its only real value now is as information. The past is where the learning lives, not the danger. It can tell you what worked, what cost too much, what pattern you finally recognize because you’ve now watched it happen enough times to name it. That’s worth something. That’s worth keeping. What’s not worth keeping is the emotional charge, the shame, the replaying of the wrong as if it were still live ammunition. Take the lesson. Leave the haunting.
The future is a different animal entirely. It’s not numb. It comes with its own fear, plenty of it, especially with the world doing what the world’s currently doing. But fear isn’t the same as deadness. The future is loud with possibility in a way the past never gets to be again, because the past already resolved into whatever it resolved into, while the future hasn’t decided anything yet. It’s filled with actual life, still forming, still able to be shaped by what you do today. That makes it far more worthy of your attention than anything that already happened, no matter how loudly the old recording tries to compete for the volume.
You cannot un-happen what already happened. You can learn what it has to teach you, and then turn your attention toward the one direction that’s still alive.
Malcolm du Plessis
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