Future forgiveness

I've been thinking a little about forgiveness and its curious intersection with the present. Although I'm a profound believer in going easy on yourself and forgiving your own mistakes, I think that can sometimes go badly wrong when it turns into forgiving yourself in advance.

The whole point of forgiveness is to recognise that, well, it's in the past, there's nothing you can do about it now. Trying to figure out who should have done better or feeling bad about decisions that are already past is a waste of time and effort that could go into improving the future. There are plenty of mistakes yet to make, and those you can actually influence.

But for some reason it seems very easy to mix up forgiving yourself for past mistakes with forgiving yourself in advance for future ones. "Well, if I don't do the right thing here, it's understandable. I'm only human after all." "I want to be productive, but I've had a tough day and nobody would blame me for just putting my feet up instead."

These are things it only really makes sense to say in retrospect. It's fine to look back and forgive a mistake, but if you're looking forward to forgiving a mistake that's entirely different. The crucial "nothing I can do about it now" isn't there. It's not recognising the futility of trying to change the past, it's creating futility about the future. It's an excuse not to try. And if you're forgiving yourself for a decision while you're making it, that means your forgiveness forms part of the calculation. You're not forgiving yourself, you're figuring out what you can get away with.

That said, the best thing to do with a future mistake is actually the same as the best thing to do with a past mistake: learn from it. The difference is that with a future mistake, if you learn from it quickly enough, you don't need to make it at all.