Luigui Bleand: Time Never Comes Back, but What You Learn Stays

ROME, ITALY — “I lost years.” “I wasted my time.” We say it looking back, when something did not turn out as we hoped: a road that did not lead where we thought, a project left half-finished, a stretch in which we felt we were going round in circles. Perhaps you have said it too. An old saying in Spanish looks at the same thing another way: “No hay mal que por bien no venga”, meaning that no misfortune comes without some good. I put it in my own words: from every situation, bad or good, something is learned. Something comes out of everything.

A few days ago I wrote in this diary about the time that never comes back and the dreams lost with it, and I still believe it: giving away your hours to what does not build you means losing dreams. So how can I now say that no time is lost? Because that entry looked ahead: how to use the hours you still have. This one looks back: what to do with the ones already gone. Time does not come back, but passing and being lost are not the same thing. It is lost when it passes without leaving you anything. When it leaves you something – a lesson, a habit, a strength you did not know you had – it was not lost: it became something you carry with you. Time never comes back, but what you learn stays.

And notice something: we usually give all the credit to pain. “Bad times teach you,” we say, as if good times were only there to be enjoyed. But a calm season or a friendship that held you up also teaches: it shows you what does you good, whom you grow with, what pace works for you. The problem is that, when something goes well, we celebrate and turn the page without asking why it went well; when it goes wrong, we pick it apart from every angle. And so we let half of what time wanted to teach us slip by.

Nor do bad times teach on their own: going over them is not the same as learning from them. In 2019, in Psychological Science, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach published five experiments with 1,674 people in total. They answered two-option questions and were then told whether they were right or wrong; with two options, either message reveals the correct answer. Even so, they learned less when told they were wrong. According to the authors, failure threatens the ego, and people tune out. Yet they learned as much from other people’s failures as from other people’s successes. In 2025, another researcher argued in the same journal that part of that result might come from a tendency to answer the same way as the first time, rather than from learning less; the authors defended their conclusion, and the debate remains open. My reading: when a failure stops feeling like a threat to who we are, it is easier to stay and hear what it has to teach.

The key, I believe, is to look back calmly and on purpose, at the good as well. In 2005, in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Shmuel Ellis and Inbar Davidi followed 98 soldiers aged 18 to 20, from an elite army unit, during a land navigation course. One group kept the usual review, focused only on mistakes. The other, after each training day, reviewed what had gone wrong and what had gone well, with the decisions behind each. Over three exercises that grew harder each time, its average score rose from 46.40 to 76.42; that of the group that looked only at mistakes, from 54.41 to 71.30. Whole groups were assigned, not individuals at random; the group that reviewed the good and the bad started lower, and the effect was modest. But the idea strikes me as beautiful: asking why something went well teaches too.

Now, learning from hard times does not mean we should go looking for them. In 2010, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Mark Seery, Alison Holman and Roxane Cohen Silver followed, over several years, 2,398 adults across the United States, who marked which of 37 negative events they had lived through, such as an illness or the death of a loved one. Overall, more adversity went with worse outcomes, but the curve was U-shaped: those who had lived through some adversity, neither none nor a lot, showed over time less distress, fewer symptoms of post-traumatic stress and more satisfaction with life. The best outcomes tended to come with two to four events, though the authors point out that a precise ideal number probably cannot be pinned down. The study is correlational, and they themselves warn that it is no invitation to seek out pain. In their words: “in moderation, whatever does not kill us may indeed make us stronger.”

How we tell our story matters too. In 2001, in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Dan McAdams and his colleagues analysed the life stories of adults aged 35 to 65, told in interviews, and of university students, in writing. They looked for “redemption”, when a bad scene turns into something good, and “contamination”, when something good is spoiled. In both groups, those whose stories held more scenes of redemption reported greater well-being; among the adults, contamination went with lower well-being. And redemption predicted well-being better than how positive the stories were overall. It is an association, measured once, with self-reported well-being: it does not prove that telling it this way makes anyone feel better. But it makes me think that saying “it was hard, and something came out of it” is not lying to yourself: it is telling all of it, both what hurt and what it left you.

And regret, that “I wasted my time” that shows up at night? In 2005, in the same journal, Neal Roese and Amy Summerville pooled 11 data sets with 3,041 people, mostly from the United States, and the most frequent regrets had to do with education and career. With 121 University of Illinois students, they found regret more intense where there was still a chance to change things, though the difference was small. Their summary: “Opportunity breeds regret.” In 2009, Denise Beike and her colleagues disputed it: according to their studies, what weighs most is what could once have been changed, no longer can be, and has not been closed. Here, and this is my own reading, I see a compass: where something can still be done, regret points you to where to walk; where it no longer can, it is time to close that chapter and keep the lesson.

Let me say it clearly: this is not a careless “everything happens for a reason”. Some things hurt and did not have to happen. Learning from something does not make it good or lighten what was wrong; what you learned is your own achievement, not a favour from whoever hurt you. Some lessons take a long time to arrive, and there is no need to rush them. Some days, all you can take from them is having reached the next one, and that counts too. And if the mistake was yours, call it what it is, with no excuses and no self-flagellation. It is hard to learn from something while you are beating yourself up over it.

So, at the end of any period, whether a year, a project, a hard season or a very good one, I suggest a single question: “What did this leave me?” Ask it once, without hurrying, about the good and the bad. Perhaps it left you a warning, a new way of doing things or simply knowing what you do not want to repeat. There is no need to revisit it every night: it is enough to keep it. May God give you the serenity to look back without fear. Hold your course, work with what you have and keep moving forward, at your own pace. No time is lost if it left you something.