(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Evolution: Part Four – The Backpack: Living Forgiveness [1] ['Douglas Schonenberg', 'Greg Dworkin', 'Bill In Portland Maine'] Date: 2026-08-10 On discovering that forgiveness isn’t changing yesterday. It’s refusing to let yesterday decide tomorrow. We left the forest behind us. The path slowly climbed another hill. Neither of us spoke. I kept thinking about what Mylo had said. “Every season belongs.” Those words stayed with me as we walked. Finally, I broke the silence. “You said every season belongs. Does that include the painful ones?” Mylo looked over. “What do you mean?” I looked at him and said, “The betrayal.” “The abuse.” “The accident.” “The people we lose.” “The dreams that never happened.” “The seasons that we wish had never existed. Do they belong?” He smiled. “Yes.” “They all belong.” “Especially those.” I frowned. “I don’t understand.” “Why should I welcome the seasons that hurt me the most?” Mylo looked down the path. “Acceptance allows you to recognize the season.” Then he looked back at me. “Forgiveness allows you to leave it behind.” Those words stayed with me as we continued walking. Without thinking, I adjusted the straps of my backpack. Mylo smiled. “What?” I asked. “I was noticing your backpack.” I laughed. “It isn’t any lighter.” “No. It isn’t.” I said. “It never will be.” Mylo answered. I looked at him. “I always thought forgiveness was supposed to make my past lighter, easier to live with, easier to carry.” He gently shook his head. “No.” “Forgiveness never promised to change the weight of your past.” “Instead, it changes the one carrying it.” For a while neither of us spoke. The breeze moved softly across the hillside. Birds circled overhead. I rested my hand on one of the straps of my backpack. “So why do I still carry it?” “Because it’s your life.” Mylo answered. “Every memory.” “Every lesson.” “Every joy.” “Every disappointment.” “Every scar.” “They are all rings in the same tree.” I nodded. “But why carry the painful memories? Why can’t we just forget them and leave them on the side of the path and continue on without them?” He stopped walking. “What would happen if you removed one of the rings from the tree?” “It wouldn’t be the same.” I said. “And if you removed one of your memories?” I looked toward the path. “I wouldn’t be me anymore.” “Exactly.” Mylo said. Then Mylo looked back down the trail we had traveled. “Tell me something.” “What?” I asked. “Why is Forgiveness part of Evolution?” I thought for a moment. “I don’t know.” He smiled. “Because when you refuse to forgive, you refuse to keep growing.” He pointed behind us. “What do you see?” “The path we’ve already walked.” I said. “And where are you standing?” “Here.” I replied. “What would have happened if, after your accident, you had refused to leave that place?” I stood quietly. “I suppose I would still be there.” He nodded. “The path would continue.” “The seasons would continue.” “The forest would continue.” “But you wouldn’t.” “A person stops evolving the moment they refuse to keep walking.” Those words settled deeply inside me. For years I had lived inside my memories. The accident. My childhood. The friendships I had lost. The career that had ended. Time continued moving while I lived in my past. But inside, I remained standing on the same patch of ground. Time moved on, but I didn’t. As long as I kept my thoughts in my past, I was not living in the present or moving into my future. I was not evolving. Mylo rested his hand gently on my shoulder. “Forgiveness isn’t forgetting where you fell.” “It’s giving you the strength to stand up and taking the next step.” We continued walking. After a long silence I finally spoke. “If I could, I would still stop the accident from ever happening.” “I know.” Mylo said. “So would I.” I looked at him. “You would?” He nodded. “I am not asking you to be grateful for your suffering.” “Suffering isn’t a gift.” “It is the storm that damages the forest.” I looked toward the sky. “Then why should I keep reminding myself that it happened?” Mylo turned and looked at me. “Because the storm already happened.” “The question you should be asking yourself isn’t whether you wanted the storm.” “The question should be: how will your tree grow after the storm is over?” I became quiet. If the accident had never happened… I would never have gone to counseling. I would never have understood my childhood. I would never have recognized the emotional abuse that shaped me. I would never have realized it was okay to walk away. I would never have found the courage to become someone different. Finally I understood. “The accident didn’t make me who I am.” Mylo smiled. “No.” “The choices I made afterward did.” For more than twenty years I had been asking myself the wrong question. Why did this happen to me? It was a question that had no answer. The better question that I should have been asking myself all along was the one that I could answer. Who am I going to become because it happened? That is Evolution. Not becoming the man I once planned to be. But instead becoming the man that I chose to become after life changed my plans. We walked a little farther. “I spent years believing forgiveness meant keeping the wrong people in my life.” Mylo smiled. “Did we ever say that?” I laughed. “No.” “What did we say?” Mylo asked. “I don’t remember.” He smiled. “I know.” “Forgiveness doesn’t ask you to return to the fire.” “It asks you to stop carrying the smoke.” I stopped walking. My mother. My father. My stepfather. The fear. The guilt. The feeling that somehow I had failed. That I was not worthy of being treated with respect. “I walked away.” “Yes.” Mylo said. “I felt guilty.” “I know.” Mylo answered. “I thought forgiving them meant going back to them.” “No.” Mylo corrected me. “It meant giving yourself permission to keep walking away.” “I also walked away from friends.” Mylo smiled. “They were part of your season.” “But not your destination.” I looked back toward the forest. “I thought when I walked away from the people that I knew that I was abandoning my roots.” Mylo shook his head. “You weren’t.” “You were allowing new roots to grow.” We continued climbing. After a while I asked, “So, was the accident supposed to happen?” Mylo didn’t answer. He picked up a broken branch. “If this branch fell during a storm, was the storm supposed to happen?” “I don’t know.” I answered. “Neither do I.” He gently placed it back on the ground. “But once it fell, the tree still had to decide how it would continue growing without it.” I looked around the path we were walking and saw: Scarred trees. Bent trunks. Broken limbs. None had stopped growing. They refused to let the storm defeat them. “So I don’t need to know why the accident happened?” I asked. “No.” Mylo answered. “You only need to decide what you will become now that the accident happened.” We stopped. I slipped my backpack from my shoulders. For a long time, I simply looked at it. Then I opened it. Inside were the masks. The memories. The laughter. The regrets. The victories. The people who stayed. The people who left. My childhood. The accident. Everything that I experienced in my life. Then… tucked between two old journals… I found two photographs. I smiled sadly. The first picture was taken before the accident. I looked healthy. Confident. Certain about where life was going. The second picture was taken afterward. I barely recognized myself. The pain was visible in my eyes. For years… I believed these photographs showed two different people. One I desperately wanted back. One I struggled to accept was the person that I was. As I lifted them from the backpack… another photograph slipped out from behind them. I frowned. “I don’t remember this one.” I picked it up. It wasn’t the young man before the accident. It wasn’t the broken man afterward. It was simply me. The person that I am today. A combination of the person that I was before the accident and the man I became after. I looked at the three photographs. Then at Mylo. “I have been asking myself the wrong question.” “What question?” He asked. “Which one in the photos is the real me?” He smiled. “And now?” “I realize that they all are.” He nodded. “They always were.” “The man before the accident wasn’t erased.” “The man after the accident wasn’t broken forever.” “They were simply…” “…different seasons…” “…of the same life.” For a long moment… none of us spoke. Then Mylo reached quietly into the backpack. He handed me the mirror. “You haven’t looked into this for a while.” I took it. I was not sure who I was going to see in the reflection. The young man. The broken man. Someone I had been searching for. Instead… I saw exactly who had always been there. Myself. I looked down at the three photographs resting beside the mirror. Then back at my reflection. Nothing in the mirror had changed. I had. I smiled. “I kept waiting to become someone else. Someone better. Someone stronger. Someone worthy.” My eyes filled with tears. “I never realized until now that I was simply becoming more completely myself.” Mylo smiled. “The photographs never changed.” “The reflection in the mirror never changed.” “You did.” I looked at the photographs again. For years, I thought forgiveness was something I had to give to the people who had hurt me. Now I understood that forgiveness was much more personal than that. I needed to forgive myself. And maybe, as you are reading this, you’re thinking about someone in your own life. Maybe there is someone that you need to forgive. Maybe it’s a parent. A friend. A spouse. Someone who betrayed you. Someone who abandoned you. Someone who hurt you. Or perhaps, the person that you need to forgive is yourself. I can’t tell you who you need to forgive. That isn’t my decision to make. Just as no one could tell me who I needed to forgive, no one can tell you. You have to find that answer for yourself. Just as I did. But I can tell you what I have learned. Forgiveness is not saying that what happened was acceptable. It isn’t pretending that the pain didn’t matter. It isn’t forgetting what happened. And it doesn’t mean inviting someone who has hurt you back into your life. Sometimes forgiveness means walking away. Sometimes it means setting a boundary. Sometimes it means accepting that you will never receive the apology that you deserved. Sometimes it means not receiving the closure that you are looking for. And sometimes… it means forgiving the person you became while you were trying to survive. Whatever forgiveness means for you, it will begin when you decide that the past no longer gets to make every decision about your future. Because every time that you refuse to move beyond what has already happened, you remain standing on the same step. The path is still there. The next step is still waiting. But you aren’t taking it. And without that next step… you cannot evolve. That doesn’t mean you have to forget the past. I haven’t. I never will. Look at my backpack. It’s still full. Your backpack may be full too. The question isn’t whether you should empty it. The question is whether you can learn to carry it without allowing it to carry you. That is where your forgiveness begins. And when you begin to forgive… you begin to move. And when you begin to move… you begin to evolve. I looked at the three photographs again. The young man before the accident. The man after the accident. The man I am today. They weren’t three different people. They were three different moments in the same life. Three seasons. Three rings. One tree. I carefully stacked the photographs together. Not because they were the same. But because they belonged together. Just like every ring. Every season. Every step. I placed them back inside the backpack. Then I picked it up once more. The weight hadn’t changed. The memories hadn’t changed. The backpack hadn’t changed. I had. Surrender had taught me to stop fighting the move life had already made. Acceptance had taught me that every season belonged. Forgiveness taught me to stop asking yesterday to become something it could never be. Evolution taught me that I would only move forward when I learned to balance the lessons from all three. We reached the top of another hill. The path stretched onward. Another step. Another season. Another ring. Another opportunity to become. Not because I had left my past behind. But because I had finally stopped trying to become someone other than the man my entire journey had been creating. I smiled. And then I kept walking. Thank you for sitting under the tree with me and listening to my musings. If you enjoyed this musing, please consider subscribing to my Substack, Musings Under the Tree. I write about empathy, personal growth, Being S.A.F.E., politics from time to time, and whatever else wanders through my mind while sitting under the tree. https://musingsunderthetree.substack.com/p/welcome-to-my-tree?r=1s6ofh [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/8/10/800082167/community/evolution-part-four-the-backpack/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/