Real Forgiveness and Real Moral Patience

I've heard it said (something like) that real forgiveness is not when you say that nothing wrong was done in the first place, but when you see that something wrong was done to you, but you don't hold it against the person who wronged you. Forgiveness doesn't change the past, or change right and wrong. Maybe what it does is allows a person, who wronged you in the past, to have become a new person, whom you no longer see as the person who wronged you. The person you forgive is the living person, even if the person who wronged you, whom you see in your memory, will always be a horror there.

(Can you forgive someone but still not trust them? Presumably you don't trust them because you don't want to risk the possibility that they haven't changed, or haven't changed for the better. Perhaps in one sense you can still release them from their past deeds, no longer see them as the same person, while still being wary of their possible or certain present character.)

"Moral impatience" could be something like the seeing of horror in the present world and the feeling that it should not be that way, that people should not be as they are. Impatience can be virtuous, just like anger, but both are dangerous. Impatience, like anger, is hard to hold in yourself. If it can lead to a good action, it is functional, but if held in oneself, can burn a person out.

So patience is what is called for -- but, there is a patience which is like the false forgiveness which says that nothing wrong was done in the first place, which simply ceases to see the moral truth. If you back off seeing the moral truth enough, you sink into bad comfort, or even despair. You somehow become incapable of doing the good you're really strong enough to do.

So the patience that is called for is like true forgiveness. Somehow you have to maintain some kind of psychological structure that can hold two opposites in you at once, to address the paradox of willingly waiting through what should not be. Perhaps two programs running in your brain simultaneously. One being a high-quality awareness of evil which calls you to fight evil (and thus to act when possible), and have an emotional witness to what should not be, as much as you can sustain. And the other being a high-quality ability to wait -- to watch and wait, and peacefully wait to speak.