Last week I posted a blog examining past choices made and asked: “Would you do it all over again?” One of my friends read the blog and asked me: “What if you killed someone or caused serious harm to someone, would you choose to do that again?”
That’s an extreme yet powerful and honest question. One which isn’t easy to imagine or consider but does require a response.
The idea I presented in last week’s blog is not that every past action was “right” or that we’d want to repeat harm — it is that once something has happened it becomes part of the moral and spiritual work of our lives to seek understanding, accountability, and transformation.
If someone had done something devastating — like taking a life — the meaning-making wouldn’t come from justifying the act, but from how they live afterwards.
Catalyst for Change
Do they face what they did? Do they seek forgiveness, change, or make amends? The goal is to take responsibility for past actions and to allow the experience, however dark or harmful it may be, to become a catalyst for deeper humanity.
In that sense, “Would you do it all over again?” becomes “What did you learn from what cannot be undone — and how has it changed the way you live now?”
When I talk about “doing it all over again,” I don’t mean that harm should ever be repeated. I would never support or encourage that type of action. But once something has happened, it becomes part of our moral and spiritual journey. The meaning isn’t in justifying what was done — it is in what comes after: taking responsibility, seeking forgiveness, learning, and living differently.
Even from our darkest moments, we can choose to become more awake, more humble, more human. In that sense, meaning-making isn’t about erasing the past — it’s about transforming it.
The Weight of Responsibility
Taking responsibility for our choices and actions doesn’t erase the past. It transforms our relationship to it. It asks us to look directly at what we’ve done and to bear the weight of it consciously, not defensively.
In the act of facing the choice and not turning away, meaning begins to take form. It is fragile, painful, and deeply moral. It is where remorse becomes an opening rather than a wall.
The Mystery of Redemption
It’s about redemption.
Redemption isn’t a reward for goodness; it’s the miracle of becoming more human after we’ve failed at being human. It is not found in forgetting, but in remembering — differently. With eyes open, with heart humbled, with an unflinching willingness to be changed.
Perhaps that’s what meaning-making truly asks of us: “Not that we’d choose our past again, but that we choose who we become because of it.”
So the question shifts once more: “When what’s done can’t be undone — can you still become someone capable of love, truth, and grace?”
The Path of Transformation
Transformation doesn’t mean we justify our wrongs; it means we allow the truth of them to remake us.
To seek forgiveness. To make amends. To live differently — as if our second chance was not deserved but is still possible.
In this way, even the darkest act can become the soil from which the seed of empathy grows. The story doesn’t end with the harm. It continues with how we carry the knowledge of it forward in our life, in our future choices and actions.
In Love and Light,
Denise