Breaking the Pattern, One Mistake at a Time
“The Buddhists believe that you pay for what you did wrong in this life, in the next. I knew what I did wrong; I just couldn’t wait a lifetime to be forgiven.”
Which got me thinking: was forgiveness really a spiritual matter, or was I simply impatient?
I’ve never been particularly good at waiting. Not for phone calls, not for apologies, not for a waiter who’s taken an unreasonable interest in the table behind me. And apparently, not for redemption either.
There’s something terribly inconvenient about having a conscience. You can be perfectly dressed, have a reservation at eight, a coffee in hand and an entire evening ahead of you, and still find yourself mentally revisiting something you said three Tuesdays ago. As if the universe had appointed you both prosecutor and defendant, with absolutely no possibility of an adjournment.
And why is it that regret always seems to have impeccable timing? It never interrupts you when you’re busy doing something useful. No, it waits until you’re in bed, just about to fall asleep, when suddenly your brain decides to organise a retrospective of every questionable decision you’ve made since 2019.
The mind, I’ve discovered, is a rather terrible private investigator. It reopens closed cases, interviews witnesses who have long since moved on and presents evidence nobody asked to see. Frankly, if it put half as much effort into remembering where I left my sunglasses, I’d be a considerably happier person.
But isn’t that the curious thing about regret? We spend so much time wishing we could go back and change a moment, while the moment itself has already packed its bags and moved on.
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And forgiveness? Well, that’s another social arrangement entirely. Sometimes it arrives with an apology. Sometimes with a conversation. Sometimes it doesn’t arrive at all. And sometimes, rather inconveniently, the person we’re waiting to hear it from is ourselves.
I used to think moving on meant pretending something hadn’t happened. A little denial, a new haircut, perhaps a weekend somewhere in Italy. But I’ve come to suspect that moving on is less about erasing the past and more about refusing to let it become your entire personality.
After all, there are only so many evenings one can spend negotiating with yesterday before one starts to wonder whether yesterday is even worth the company.
There are cities to get lost in, tables to sit at, books to finish, strangers to meet and mornings that deserve considerably more attention than the mistakes of an old afternoon. There are coffees to drink and lives to live. And quite frankly, I have never known a bad decision to improve with excessive analysis.
But perhaps the real trouble isn’t making mistakes. It’s recognising a pattern and somehow finding yourself repeating it anyway. We have a remarkable talent for dressing old habits in new circumstances and calling it a fresh start. A different person, a different Tuesday, the same familiar plot. At what point does coincidence become a pattern, and at what point do we finally decide to change the story?
Perhaps breaking the pattern is its own form of forgiveness. Not pretending the past never happened, but refusing to give it another starring role.
Surely that’s enough to settle the account?
And if forgiveness takes another lifetime, I’m afraid it will have to catch up with me. I have places to go, people to become, reservations to make and absolutely no intention of missing the morning.
Because at some point, don’t we all have to stop asking whether yesterday forgives us and start asking whether we’re ready for tomorrow?
And preferably, before the coffee gets cold.
