At 55, I have changed my mind about forgiveness, the past and the dreams we thought life had already taken away from us.

I will be 55 this week, and birthdays have a funny way of making us look in both directions at once. We look back at the woman we were, the choices we made and the things that happened to us, but we also begin to see more clearly what we want to carry into the next chapter.

There are two things in particular that I have changed my mind about over the last few years. One is the idea that we cannot change the past, and the other is the idea that regret is simply something we have to learn to live with. The more I think about them, the more connected they seem, because both are really about our relationship with what has already happened.

Forgiveness Can Change the Way the Past Lives Inside Us

We are often told that we cannot change the past, and in the most literal sense that is obviously true. We cannot go back and change what someone did, what we said, what we chose or what happened to us. But I have come to believe that we can change the way those experiences continue to live inside us.

For me, that starts with forgiveness. I used to think forgiveness was mostly about the other person, almost as if forgiving meant letting them off the hook, making what happened acceptable or deciding that it wasn't really so bad after all. I no longer see it that way.

I think forgiveness is something we do for ourselves. When a memory still carries the same emotional charge years later, it can trigger the anger, fear, sadness or betrayal we felt at the time. Our body is responding to the memory in the present, and in that moment we are not simply remembering what happened. We are reliving a piece of it.

That is what I find so profound about forgiveness. The memory does not disappear and the facts do not change, but our reaction to them can. We can remember something without being pulled back into the original emotion, almost as if we are looking at it from the outside rather than being trapped inside the scene again.

There is so much peace in that. We can know that something happened, know that it was wrong and still no longer allow it to disturb our nervous system every time it returns to mind. In that sense, I do think we can change the past, because we can change the place it occupies inside us.

I Want to Reverse My Regrets

The second thing I have changed since turning 50 is my relationship with regret.

Most of us have something we always wanted to do when we were younger. Maybe it was travelling, living somewhere else, starting something of our own, creating something, studying something or simply having an adventure that belonged only to us. Then life happened. There were children, relationships, careers, ageing parents, mortgages and all the responsibilities that come with being the woman everybody relies on.

Somewhere along the way, the dream was pushed further and further into the background. We may even have told ourselves that we didn't really want it anymore, because sometimes it is easier to stop wanting something than to admit that we have no space for it.

Then around 50, especially through the years of our Chiron Return, those old desires have a habit of resurfacing. Things we thought we had outgrown begin to whisper again, and we find ourselves wondering whether they were ever really gone.

I decided I wanted to stop treating regret as something fixed. Instead of looking back and thinking I should have done something twenty years ago, I started asking myself whether I could still do it now.

I call this reversing my regrets.

That question is one of the reasons I am writing this from Marrakech. I booked a one-way ticket and decided that from here I would simply see where the wind blows me. There is no perfectly organised master plan behind it, and that is exactly the point. I had wanted this kind of freedom and adventure for years, and I realised that if I kept waiting for the perfect moment, I might simply keep waiting.

I couldn't be prouder of myself for taking that leap, not because booking a flight is particularly dramatic, but because I finally stopped making the dream negotiate with every practical reason not to do it.

Perhaps this is one of the gifts of getting older. We become much more aware that time is not endless, and that awareness can either frighten us or make us much more precise about what matters.

There are things that genuinely belong in the past, but there are also dreams we have simply postponed for so long that we started mistaking postponement for letting go.

So this is the question I am taking into my 55th year: what is the one thing you have always wanted to do?

Maybe the more useful question is whether the reason you are not doing it is still true, or whether life has changed and you simply haven't changed your mind with it yet.

With so much love & respect,

Sharonah x