Making peace with what you cannot choose in life

Spring is well underway, and summer is approaching. Around this time, I always find more time to read, write, and reflect on the past year. The same is true for my work around forgiveness.

From September 2025 to April 2026, Frits Koster and I had the opportunity to facilitate the Mindfulness-Based Training in Forgiveness (MBTF) in many places – sometimes together, sometimes separately – online and in person, in the Netherlands and beyond. This has made me realize even more clearly that forgiveness cannot simply be trained as a skill. In MBTF, we support individuals in developing capacities that facilitate and sustain forgiveness. Writing our book De moed van vergeving (The Courage of Forgiveness) has also contributed to this insight. However, it is the questions and experiences of the participants that inspire me the most and encourage deeper reflection.

After one MBTF training, participant Shiva Thorsell sent us an email containing a thought that has stayed with me ever since. In MBTF, we explore three forms of forgiveness: forgiving oneself, forgiving others, and asking for forgiveness. But perhaps, she suggested, there is a fourth form as well: forgiving life – making peace with what you could neither choose nor prevent.

What touched me most in her reflection was that she gave words to something I often recognise in practice, which is that even when no one has done anything wrong, people can still live with anger, bitterness or resistance towards life itself. Towards the body that became ill. Towards a history that unfolded long before anything could be chosen. Towards the absence of what was most deeply hoped for or longed for.

In that sense, the question of how to make peace with what you could not choose or prevent does not seem strange or unrealistic. It gives language to an inner movement many people know, but for which we do not yet always have adequate words. I think of someone who lost her partner shortly after an unexpected illness, and who then learned that she herself was terminally ill. In such experiences, there is not always someone to blame, yet there is often a deep struggle with how life has unfolded. It is easy to understand why people might then search for words. They might want to make peace with what they could not choose.

The longer I sit with this thought, the more inclined I am to regard it as a genuine form of forgiveness. Interestingly, the Heartland model of forgiveness speaks not only of self-forgiveness and forgiving others, but also of forgiving situations, or circumstances beyond our control. This is not about forgiving another person, but about an inner movement in which someone gradually tries to make peace with what they could not choose, could not prevent, and often still cannot change. To me, this thought also touches on an ancient Buddhist teaching: that much suffering arises from causes and conditions. Mindfulness can help us recognise that thoughts, emotions and suffering are interconnected and arise from a multitude of conditions and experiences. While not everything that hurts can be traced back to blame, sometimes it can be traced to a difficult relationship with circumstances beyond our control.

Perhaps this is precisely why the question continues to fascinate me. There are experiences that cannot easily be approached through familiar processes such as forgiving someone, forgiving oneself or asking for forgiveness. Consider illness, physical limitations, loss that cannot be undone, family history, ancestry or the deepest longings in life that were never realised. Such experiences do not always involve someone to blame, but they often involve a form of inner resistance. This is often accompanied by the feeling that life itself has taken or withheld something essential.

Whether we should ultimately speak of a fourth form of forgiveness here, I do not yet know. What I do see is that this question reveals an area that is often overlooked in conversations about forgiveness: our relationship to the things we could not choose, could not prevent and still cannot change. Questions such as these show me that my understanding of forgiveness continues to deepen through practice, even now as our book De moed van vergeving is about to be published.* To be continued.

Joyce Cordus, 16 May 2026

*If you would like to read more about our forthcoming book De moed van vergeving, you can find the publisher’s page here. An English edition of the book is due to be published by Routledge UK in Spring 2027. It will be titled Mindfulness-Based Forgiveness: Theory, Practice and Application.