A Life of Regret?

Maybe it’s age, but as the years whiz by I find myself reflecting back over life, my fifty-plus years with Karen, my kids, my relationships with parents, friends, and even adversaries. Two wonderful careers, and now well into my third. The memories are more often than not happy and positive, but from time to time another, darker, emotion enters: regret.

On occasion I think those “I wonder what would have happened if…….” thoughts. Suppose I had stayed in teaching and not gone to law school? Suppose I had chosen a legal specialty sooner? Suppose earlier in life I had dedicated more time to writing? Suppose I had sorted out my spirituality sooner?

Retrospection is not a bad thing, as long as it comes in the right flavour. Socrates, facing execution for the crime of making young people question conventional thinking, told the court, and us, that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Critical thinking is in far too short supply these days, and like Socrates, we need to probe and question and re-examine all the givens, including our own histories.

But where it becomes toxic is when we allow regret to take the place of the lessons. If, for example, I look back on a certain life choice and can’t escape that my decision was one of pure impulse, and the result was not a good one, I can sulk and whimper, or I can take the lesson and work on my still-very-much-alive impulsivity.

Lots of times my cerebral processes were hijacked by my crocodile brain and I did just stupid things. But here’s the thing — wallowing in regret and self-loathing today does not erase history, but it can ruin today and impoverish tomorrow. Taking the lesson and making today and tomorrow better is a wonderful thing. Sitting under my self-generated black cloud is not.

There are a thousand reasons we did what we did yesterday. Sometimes there were factors beyond our control, but often we made our own choices, wise or unwise. Sometimes we got far more than we deserved, and sometimes life was abundantly unjust. But that’s behind us. Nothing can be done about it.

What we can control is today, and we have powerful ways to create a better tomorrow. As we come to the end of one year and step into the next, don’t let the past poison the future.