The card Judgement is modeled after the Christian belief that the dead will rise for the Last Judgment. An angel blows a trumpet as dead people rise from their graves. Great tidal waves or mountains loom in the distance.

 

On Judgement Day, man is resurrected as the past is laid to rest. Regret, shame, resentment, 'what ifs'... Unfortunately there is no way to erase the past. It does not change however much we ponder it, it does not go away if we ignore it. 'What's done is done.' 'There's no use crying over spilt milk.' Almost any folk wisdom or self-help advice about the past basically says: forget about it. "Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience."

 

Of course it's good to feel this way most of the time. To be positive, live in the moment. But maybe it's not entirely true that bad memories are best exorcised from our lives as soon as possible. Reflection and regret serve important functions, and we shouldn't dismiss them too easily. As writer Carina Chocano puts it:

 

There’s a particular disdain for regret in US culture. It’s regarded as self-indulgent and irrational — a ‘useless’ feeling. We prefer utilitarian emotions, those we can use as vehicles for transformation, and closure. ‘Dwelling’, we tend to agree, gets you nowhere. It just leads you around in circles. (...)

 

The illusion of control that these tools grant us over every aspect of our lives is powerful. There is always something we can do today to avoid regret tomorrow. To admit regret is to admit to a previous failure of self-control. ‘In the reigning economic models of decision, human beings are “calculating machines” who decide their preferences based on calculations of utilities and probabilities,’ [psychologist Janet Landman] writes. ‘We deny regret in part to deny that we are now or have ever been losers.’ (...)

 

It’s in this privileging of reason unfettered by emotion, this thinking of people as ‘calculating machines’ that Landman suggests we’ve gone all wrong. The problem lies in clinging to absolutes and falling for false dichotomies. Sometimes, our assessment of reality is faulty, or obsolete, or weirdly ideological, or based on false dichotomies such as reason vs emotion, or the past vs the present. Mixed feelings are not only what make us human, they’re what make us truly rational. They help us arrive at complicated truths by way of a dialectic process. Rather than deny regret, we should embrace ambivalence. We should strive for an ideal — that is, behave as if it’s possible for an absolute ideal to exist — while remembering that it doesn’t, that in fact outcomes are random, and that all possibilities exist simultaneously.

 

So, negative feelings about the past have their time and place in the human experience. Nevertheless, it is good to investigate if we are engaged with painful memories in a constructive manner, and whether or not we are sometimes too pre-occupied with the past for our own good. Because there is also a time and place for acceptance, reconciliation, forgiveness, letting go, and moving on. The past cannot be changed, but in this moment we can choose how to deal with it, and we can choose where we go from here. And facing the past doesn't mean we turn away from it. It means that we look it straight in the eye and confront it.