Forgiveness is self-empowerment
A summer from my youth never stops teaching me about choices.
I started competitive swimming in the 1970s and went to the University of Florida for swim camp in 1981. We lived in a fraternity house — FIJI, I think — and each day was built around water: up before dawn, two straight hours in the pool, from 6:30 to 8:30, stumble out, eat, another hour, lunch, then two more hours of laps, from 4 to 6. You learn to live in lanes. You learn how quiet the world can be when you’ve spent many hours submerged.
We swam with names you saw in “Swimming World”: David Larson, Craig Beardsley, John Hillencamp, Rowdy Gaines. Legends. The U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympics left some competitors edgy and hungry; it was palpable.
But the faces I remember best weren’t the medalists. It was the head camp counselor — I can’t remember his name, but his face is etched in my mind: earnest, a little weathered, eyes that watched you. His job was to keep the campers safe and comfortable, and he taught us little things — like how to catch flies with our bare hands and running with us in the morning to the “fast”pool at the recently opened “O’Connell Center”.
Swimming is an individual sport; the pool imposes a private silence. That solitude breeds other obsessions. Rubik’s Cubes were the craze of 1981. A Belgian swimmer who didn’t speak English showed me the basics with a few gestures and directions drawn. Charles & Dianne’s Wedding broadcast may have been the most significant event that summer. Getting those six sides of the cube the same color was my Mt Everest, though, it felt better than winning a race!
The one crack in that summer was my Casio calculator watch. That Casio felt like a rare piece of cool. One day, it disappeared. Stolen. Saying it out loud felt like confessing something private.
What happened next is the part that stuck. The counselor didn’t lecture me or make me feel small. He treated the situation like a ledger: people and things have value, whether in dollars or what they mean to you. Emotional capital hurts the most. He organized a search. It wasn’t about punishment so much as repair.
Another swimmer, 5-6 years my senior, was wearing my Casio! The counselor took me aside and explained that he could get me the watch back; but, the other camper had recently lost his girlfriend in a horrendous accident. “Would it be hard to forgive him?” he asked.
That quiet handling taught me more than any medal. Value isn’t only on price tags; it’s in the small gestures that keep a community human. The watch was a watch, but the counselor’s response showed me how to understand and move on.
Forgiveness is self-empowerment.
My 1981 summer — lane lines, chlorine, Rubik’s Cubes, and a counselor whose quiet actions stuck with me. The financial angle is simple: choose well-being over resentment. Forgiveness frees you. Like the counselor, focus on repair, keep connection humane, and hold boundaries that protect what really matters.