The Value Of Repentance

What is the value of repentance? Let’s go in parts: Every day we experience well-known emotions: joy, jealousy, sadness, pain, etc. However, we give less credit to repentance. Why and why repent?

The past stays in the past, and it is impossible to change the things that we did or did not do, what we said to loved ones, or those things that we omitted to speak about. As a popular saying goes “He would not exist”, so it is not worth wasting energy with hindsight. However, they are there and sometimes they torment us too much.

The value of repentance

In a logic of linear time, repentance is useless, since we can never go back to the past and modify reality and the course of things that emerges from it. However, if we are a little more observant, we will realize the value of repentance, which has an important role. Not only in relation to the past, but also in our present and our future. Actually, this is his great contribution to our lives.

Our brain builds emotional structures on our past experiences. So all the actions for which we repent are stored in our memory. Therefore, they are part of our personal history. The same that allows us to make better decisions for the future.

Regret is part of the mechanisms of our mind. The one that allows us to decide the courses of action based on our experience and, of course, our will. Remember that, unlike animals, our behavior is not guided exclusively by instincts. All the experiences we have regretted leave a mark in our memory, which guides us in future actions.

The role of regret in decision making

All of this is particularly important because human beings have the ability to imagine the future, to plan it, to build scenarios for our next actions. In all these cases, the feeling of regret is present. Actually, it is this that makes us choose between one option and another. It is impossible, or at least very complex, to imagine human life without regret. The importance of this emotion is evident in the following example:

Let’s think, if we had lottery tickets in our hands, and we also had any other everyday object, such as a gift-wrapped book, of which we do not know the title, and we were close to many other individuals who also have those objects. What would be easier to exchange with them? Would you more easily change the tenth or the book?

Obviously in most cases the answer would be the book, because we know that if the other book is better than the one we had before, the regret would be minimal. But if we exchange our tenth for another, and in the end it turns out that the tenth winner is the one we possessed at the beginning, then we would immediately experience deep regret, a terrible sense of regret.

This small example highlights the role of regret in individual decisions and how it impacts our courses of action.

Finally, it is important to note that the more important the decisions we make in our lives, the greater the repercussion the possibility of future regret has, since this is like an alert that tries to avoid actions that can become a mistake.