Forgiveness

It's a real burden to drag your past failures around with you. Dwelling on things you did wrong can't really do anything to change them. In fact, nothing can change the past, so there's really questionable benefit to thinking about how you would if you could. You may as well dream about superpowers for all the good it will do.

But, in the words of Santayana, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. If we let go of our failures, how can we learn from them? If we could just forget our mistakes and move on, I'm sure it would feel good, but what would stop us from just making the same mistakes again? I think this problem makes it difficult to truly let go of failures, because you know deep down that your failures were necessary for you to learn. Forget the failures, forget the lesson.

The issue with failure, though, is that it often has a moral or normative dimension. Sometimes a failure shoulds you: it's not just that you would have acted differently in retrospect, or that the outcome wasn't ideal, it's that you did the wrong thing, and you should have done the right thing. This feeling is negative and dangerous, but at times I think it can be correct to feel bad about something, to recognise that something you did was not just suboptimal but wrong.

So what we need is a way to tease apart these two components, to keep the lessons learned from doing wrong without carrying around guilt or shame. I think the answer to this is forgiveness. Forgiveness is a powerful idea because it ties those two halves together; you can't really forgive yourself without acknowledging what you did wrong, and you can't really forgive yourself without letting go of the past. You need both to forgive: the acknowledgement and the release.

I see forgiveness as an important alternative to atonement. Atonement holds on to the past, pretending it can be changed or fixed, and by doing that stops you from accepting and learning from your mistakes. Forgiveness acknowledges those mistakes, accepts them, and lets them stay in the past where they belong.