This week, a family member sent a message on our group thread: Micchami Dukkadam.

I had to look it up. It means, roughly: If I have hurt you in any way, knowingly or unknowingly, I ask your forgiveness.

For Jains (followers of Jainism, one of India’s ancient religions) this is part of an annual tradition centered on reflection and forgiveness. People ask forgiveness from those in their orbit and make an intentional effort not to carry those grievances forward.

I've been thinking about forgiveness and letting go a lot more since I turned 40.

We carry around so much baggage from our experiences in life: the ill feeling that started with something small and was never named, telling someone off, being told off, the embarrassment you still feel about a room you walked out of in 2014, the mistakes we made, and the mistakes someone else made that you're somehow still paying for.

Some of it is anger at other people, and a surprising amount of it is anger at ourselves. It doesn't just disappear with time. Sometimes it requires recognizing what we’re carrying, deciding we’re ready to put it down, and eventually, forgive.

Which makes me think there is something beautiful about building forgiveness into the calendar rather than waiting until we feel ready.

A 2024 randomized trial involving more than 4,500 people across five countries tested a brief, self-guided forgiveness workbook. Some participants received it immediately; others were asked to wait two weeks. The group that received it right away showed greater forgiveness and fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety than the group still waiting. Researchers also reported gains in hope and in aspects of flourishing, including people's sense of financial security.

No one's net worth had changed. What changed was their relationship to what they already had.

This newsletter is built on the idea that money is an instrument, not an end. But an instrument is only as steady as the hand holding it.

If you're carrying years of resentment, regret, or anger, some of it aimed at yourself, it can become harder to make clear decisions, including decisions about money.

Think about the concentrated position in your portfolio that you cannot bring yourself to trim. The stated reason is taxes. Somewhere underneath it may also be the discomfort of admitting, I held this too long.

Or the house, the account, or the career path that keeps getting funded long after we stopped wanting it, because changing course would mean questioning a decision made by a younger version of ourselves.

Or the thing we didn't know we were supposed to do years ago, and the way not knowing turned into avoidance, and avoidance turned into something that feels a lot like shame.

We talk a lot in finance about sunk costs. Maybe forgiveness and letting go are one way of dealing with the emotional version of those sunk costs.

That is the real value of a ritual like this: it gives us a reason to stop, take stock of what we are still carrying, and decide what we no longer want to take with us.

Micchami Dukkadam to anyone I've hurt this year. And, perhaps harder, to myself.