Last month, I took a long drive out to northern Iowa to visit Loren Toussaint, a young talent in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of forgiveness research. Its key overall finding — and this is from hundreds of studies — is that when you don’t forgive someone who’s done you wrong, you never forget it, and it stresses you out, increasing your chances of mental troubles like depression and physical ones like cardiovascular disease.
My Miller-McCune story on this stuff is here (link).
The most interesting thing to come out of our conversations that didn’t end up in the story was this quote, which Toussaint attributed to Michigan statistician Roderick Little: “Science is about looking at the world and making everything that happens in it relevant to the area you’re investigating.” For Toussaint, everything from spirituality to heart attacks is seen through the prism of forgiveness. As I was driving home, I thought about that a lot, and I realized that many of the people in my life think in an analogous way — seeing everything in their world as an economist, or an artist, or a journalist, or a psychologist, or whatever. As Toussaint says, of course, that this has advantages and disadvantages, but it’s worth remembering, especially the next time you’re in a brutal argument.