Past and Future Are Up to You (More or Less)
On repentance and hacking time
The past stays the same — or does it?
Repentance
Think of how we confess and repair wrongdoing. This conundrum exposes the problem of the past. Something happened and it can’t be changed, warranting the apology. Of course, we must demonstrate that we know what we did wrong. And yet one of the most convincing apologies is the refusal to repeat the story of the error in all its detail, to interrupt others from replaying it, to remove ourselves from those patterns, to stop those ripple effects, to delete what can be deleted, so it does not keep causing harm. We demonstrate we know what we did by leaving a hole where it used to be and filling it with something else.
Repentance always addresses what we’ll do in the future, but it’s fuzzy on whether the past is past. If we’d done nothing wrong, we wouldn’t have to repent and change our ways. Yet, having truly repented, we also need to change the narrative that links us to our own pasts. We can’t continue to be the person who once did that. Not even a changed version of that person. In some sense, we have to hold the vision of a past in which we didn’t do that. We have to reject the real past and imagine the alternate past.
