I keep coming back to this line, letting it sit with me longer than most words usually do:
“Forgive yourself for not knowing earlier what only time could teach.”
There’s something disarming about it. Gentle, but honest. Comforting, yet quietly challenging. It feels like an invitation to stop replaying old scenes in your head and finally loosen the grip on the version of yourself that didn’t have the answers yet.
We’re incredibly hard on our past selves. We look back with today’s clarity and wonder how we missed the signs, made that choice, trusted that person, stayed too long, or walked away too early. We judge ourselves as if we had access to the same insight back then that we do now. But we didn’t. That wisdom didn’t exist yet. It was still being formed, slowly, through living.
Time is a strange teacher. It doesn’t hand out lessons neatly or announce when class is in session. It teaches through repetition, discomfort, trial, and sometimes heartbreak. It teaches through moments we’d rather forget and choices we wish we could redo. And only after enough of those moments does understanding begin to settle in.
What we often call “mistakes” are really just steps taken without the benefit of hindsight. You didn’t fail to see clearly; clarity hadn’t arrived yet. You weren’t careless; you were learning. You weren’t weak; you were becoming.
There’s a quiet relief in allowing yourself that grace. In recognizing that the person you were did the best they could with the tools they had at the time. Growth isn’t about erasing the past. It’s about integrating it—letting it inform you without letting it define you.
Forgiveness, in this sense, isn’t dramatic or loud. It’s subtle. It shows up when you stop cringing at old memories and instead nod at them, acknowledging what they gave you. It’s choosing to say, “I understand why you did that,” rather than, “I should’ve known better.”
Because knowing better is often the result, not the starting point.
Time doesn’t just teach us what to do differently; it teaches us compassion. For others, yes—but especially for ourselves. It softens the sharp edges of regret and turns them into something more useful: perspective.
So if you’re carrying around guilt for lessons learned late, pause for a moment. Consider what it took for you to learn them at all. The patience of days, the accumulation of experiences, the courage to keep going even when things didn’t make sense.
You are not behind. You are not late. You are exactly where someone who has lived, learned, and grown would be.
And maybe the real wisdom isn’t just in what time teaches us—but in finally forgiving ourselves for needing time to learn it.
Kenrick Vaz 