My daughter’s family has a rescue dog named Eva. She is a kind, gentle, loving, and a very happy dog.
It would seem that she must have had an easy and happy puppyhood, but that wasn’t the case at all. In fact, it was completely the opposite. It was hard, mean, and by all appearances, cold and lonely.
However, instead of dwelling on her past, she goes for the goodness.
This is why they chose her; she was going for the goodness in spite of all the reasons why she could choose to be angry and bitter instead. As she has lived with her new family, she has increased her goodness ration proportionality.
I understand that many rescue dogs are like Eva. They go for the goodness with all of their being.
We don’t appear to be as good as Eva is at going for the goodness. Instead, we allow our past to direct our present, which is then the architect of our future.
Even though we have so many more opportunities and abilities to choose goodness than a dog does, we don’t choose it. We dwell in past hurts, both true, and perceived.
To add to the pain, we allow blame – not just to others – but also to ourselves, to fester and grow.
Remaining in this victim viewpoint in any degree leaves us in the same situation that we are trying to forget, or from which we wait to be rescued. However, unlike a dog that has to hope and wait for rescue, we can rescue our own lives and stop waiting for someone else to do it.
In fact, we must rescue our own lives, and not wait for another to do so, because no one else can. No one can “fix” us because it is our own hanging onto a past picture of lack of love that must be resolved if we want to be more like Eva – kind, gentle, loving, and happy.
The question is how to do this? Most of us have a part of our past, whether it was yesterday’s past or childhood pasts, which were painful. They weren’t fair. They weren’t kind, and they were not filled with joy.
How do we leave that memory, how do we forgive the players, how to we choose the now of happiness instead.
Viktor Frankl wrote: “A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth–that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.”
With the goal of love in mind, how can we not go for the goodness? 
As we rise to the awareness of Love’s everywhere presence in the turn of a flower petal, the shape of a leaf, the smile of a child, the dew on the grass, the song of a bird, we begin to dissolve the need to hold on to and reciprocate with anger through either passive or aggressive choices.
What use is there in not forgiving? Can we see the stars when the earth is shrouded in fog? Neither can we see goodness within the fog of victim-hood.
We all yearn for world peace. However, how can there be world peace when there is not family peace? How can we wish for love to be known in everyone’s heart, when we don’t know it within ours?
In order to forgive others and ourselves and reach for the awareness of infinite love, we have to rescue ourselves from the false claim of victim-hood. We have to aim for a higher love.
The sad story is that most victims become the abusers, sometimes physically, and always emotionally.
Perhaps it doesn’t seem as if we are being abusive when we say we have a right to be sad, lonely, and depressed. However, for the people that love us, it is a hard thing to live with.
Sometimes we are abusive by punishing the other person who we feel has abused us, or other people that act like them, or remind us of them.
And, even if none of this is true for you, in victim-hood we are always abusive to ourselves.
We exist to share, live, and love divine Love. Anything less than that, we are depriving ourselves of the infinite happiness that has been gifted to us as a result of our being.
We can rise higher. We can rise above the claims that exist within the worldview picture, and lift ourselves into the awareness and understanding that divine Love does not know abuse or lack.
Starting with this perfect sense of Love, we can make day-to-day choices that will begin to dissolve the pictures of abuse in all its forms, past, present, and future.
Let’s all make Eva’s Choice and go for the goodness.
Let’s all choose to make a higher love the architect of our future, and let the past bury the past.
You might enjoy reading this book:
Man’s Search for Meaning: Viktor E. Frankl
Eva’s pictures by Lara Lewis
Two sites you might like: Pet Finders and more pets at Pet Answers