There is a pervasive burden that comes with looking backward across the emotional resume of our lives.
We revisit old choices with new wisdom and wonder why we could not have seen more clearly then. We replay conversations in our minds. Sometimes, obsessively so. We mourn the years spent afraid, asleep, angry, ashamed, distracted or simply trying to survive. We imagine an earlier version of ourselves standing at a crossroads and want to reach back through time shouting warnings: Don’t trust them. Leave sooner. Speak up. Rest. Love yourself more. Forgive faster. Be brave.
But time does not work in favor of reinventing the past.
The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron once wrote that compassion begins when we realize our own human confusion. The Hebrew scriptures speak of the human being as formed from dust — not iron, not certainty, not perfection. In Hindu traditions, spiritual awakening is often described not as instant enlightenment but as gradual unveiling: the soul remembering itself through many experiences, many lifetimes, many lessons. Even Jesus, in the Christian tradition, speaks repeatedly of people who “have eyes but do not yet see,” not as condemnation, but as recognition of the slow unfolding of understanding.
Wisdom is not downloaded into us all at once. Some truths must enter through lived experience. Some knowledge must ripen.
A child will not understand grief the way an elder does. A person fresh from heartbreak cannot yet comprehend the strange mercy that may someday grow around the wound. Someone trapped in fear cannot simply leap into courage because another person tells them to. The soul learns in spirals, not straight lines.
Yet we punish ourselves for this.
We expect our former selves to possess the emotional vocabulary, the spiritual maturity, the good boundaries, confidence, healing, and perspective that only years later would emerge through trial and transformation. We judge the person we were, using tools we did not yet own.
But what if our earlier selves were not failing? What if they were learning at the only speed the heart could bear?
Across spiritual traditions, time itself is often treated as sacred. Ecclesiastes says there is “a time for every purpose under heaven.” Indigenous wisdom traditions frequently speak of life as seasons rather than tests.
In Sufism, longing and wandering are not signs that God has abandoned us, but often the very terrain through which the soul is shaped. The Taoist tradition reminds us that forcing growth before its season creates imbalance. A fruit cannot be ripened by command alone.
You were once doing the best you could with the awareness you had. Not perfect. Not always wise. Not always healthy. But sincere in ways perhaps only God fully understands.
This does not mean we avoid accountability. Growth matters. Repair matters. Apologies and amends matter, profoundly. Transformation matters deeply. But shame and wisdom are not the same thing. Self-condemnation does not heal the past. It only chains us to it.
There is a difference between saying: “I wish I had known” and “I should have already known.” One is grief. The other is cruelty.
And so perhaps forgiveness of self begins here: not in pretending the past was ideal, but in recognizing that consciousness unfolds gradually. The person you are today exists because the person you were survived long enough to become them.
Every tradition carries some version of this truth. The lotus grows from mud. The pearl forms around irritation. The phoenix rises through ash. The resurrection comes after the tomb. The seed breaks before the tree appears.
Transformation in process is rarely elegant.
When we look back at our younger selves, we often declare them fools. But perhaps heaven sees courage. Perhaps the universe sees a soul stumbling toward light with limited vision but genuine longing. Perhaps what embarrasses us now was once simply necessary scaffolding for the next stage of becoming.
Forgive yourself for not knowing earlier what only time could teach. Not because the past did not matter. Not because pain was unreal. But because wisdom is often experiential before it is intellectual. Some lessons cannot be borrowed. They must be lived.
And the beautiful thing is this: the fact that you see differently now means the teaching worked. You are no longer who you were. That is not evidence of failure. That is evidence of growth.
Wil Darcangelo, M.Div, is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister of the First Church of Lancaster at the Bulfinch Meetinghouse in Massachusetts, progressive theologian and essayist on optimistic spirituality in the Information Age. Follow him on Substack, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
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