One of the insights from my Plum Village practice is that it is never too late to make peace with someone. If we have said something that has caused hurt, Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh) advises us to send a kind thought to catch up with the angry one and neutralise it. How we respond to someone who has passed away is just as valuable as for a person who is still alive.We think that when someone dies, time stops and it’s too late to repair our relationships. What I have learned, though, is that it’s never too late. Through our ability to reflect and remember, we can in the present moment go back and heal the past. The remarkable thing is that when we change our perception of the past, this changes our perception in the present. And when we change our perception in the present, we cannot help but change our future.We can communicate with someone who is no longer in our lives in many different ways. We can talk to them, write a letter to them, and pray for them. We don’t need to let the concept of time as a linear process stop us from doing the healing work that can free us from our self-imposed prison of regret and suffering.My wife, Paz, has a practice that really works for her. If she finds it difficult to reach a resolution with one person, she will offer kindness to someone else, trusting that the energy will also reach the person she is having a difficulty with.One summer in New York, she was having a hard day. A friend in a meditation group she was running had accused her of being unkind. While Paz felt she had been misunderstood, she left the conversation with the seed of doubt that maybe she had been unskillful.As she was walking home on that baking hot day in Manhattan, she saw an unhoused man on the sidewalk with nothing to drink. She went into a shop, bought some water, and gave it to him. In that instant, she burst into tears because she recognised that this act of generosity was also healing the hurt and self-doubt that she had experienced just a few minutes before.Paz’s insight was that on the ultimate level, it doesn’t really matter what our story is; we are all interconnected and therefore healing can take place in many manifestations. Since then, she has made offering kindness to others a conscious part of her practice.— Excerpted from ‘Being with Busyness’ by Brother Phap Huu and Jo Confino, with permission from Aleph