Imagine an ironworker trying to bend and shape a piece of cold iron. No matter how hard the iron is battered, little or nothing will happen.

We do the same when we try to deal with the past by reliving regrets about it over and over. We cannot change it. It still retains its shape, and we wear ourselves out with our fruitless efforts and futile fantasizing.

Forgiveness is the fire, the heat that makes regrets about the past malleable so we can deal with them. It doesn’t change the past… It changes us in the present, where those regrets about the past live.

from When Your Grief is Complicated by Regrets