Regret: A Thing You Can Live Without

If you are fortunate to be born into near-perfect circumstances you may have no regrets about your childhood. Your loving and wise parents may have helped you build unassailable self esteem, and their example of mutual respect may shape all your relationships with its positive model. Free from fear in your neighborhood, you may have grown up free to think of things other than your safety and the safety of those you love. The good education afforded you by superior neighborhood public schools along with the diversity of the student body served thereby may give you a balanced and tolerant outlook.

If you are always completely honest, you may never have to regret telling a lie, but because you are always tactful, you may never have to regret telling someone a truth they were not ready to hear. Since you forgive instantly you may never have to regret the time you wasted holding a grudge. Because you courageously seized every opportunity to improve your skills and develop your talents, you may not regret opportunities you missed having missed none, and because you courageously fought for justice and tried in every way to help others yet took no unwarranted responsibility for outcomes you could not control, you may not have to regret that you failed to stand up for your fellow humans or that any negative outcome was your fault.

Humans, however, are not perfect, and probably the above idyllic description fits no one's life circumstances. Having regrets is probable, if not inevitable.

Life is a gauntlet we run, with things poised to go wrong on every side. Your parents might be one of the fifty percent of couples who divorce. Your sibling might have a disability that through no fault of theirs siphons off most of the parental attention that might have otherwise gone toward building your self esteem. The bottom might drop out of your neighborhood public school budget, bleeding dry the resources that might have prepared you for success. Your lack of self esteem might make you prey to aggressive peers in school, leading you to a negative self image. You might forgive a person who should have been punished, who then goes on to commit a terrible act that you might have otherwise prevented, or you might help a person, but that help might accidentally harm them. You might develop a talent such as playing a musical instrument, yet never realize your dreams of performance.

Regret awaits on every side, every day.

Regret is not nearly as powerful an emotion as love. One can turn away from regret and forget it. It takes practice, but it is like a muscle: the more you do it, the easier it gets. It seems as if we instinctively hold onto a negative experience for which we are to blame, blaming ourselves repeatedly in a kind of automatic self-punishment. Yet if you think about what you are doing, you can see how much of a waste of time this is. You can come to understand that part of loving yourself is practicing self-forgiveness.

They say time is a great healer and it is really true. Regrets are memories, and the mind tends to weed out the hurtful and retain the joyful over time. To avoid regret, simply cut to the chase. Imagine how you will feel about a regretful memory in a few years and tell yourself to feel that way now. Why wait? If you are experiencing regret now, perhaps even deeply regretting something fresh and raw and new, it may be difficult for you to assimilate this idea. Nevertheless I assure you that it is possible to get past regret and go forward in life with a more joyful existence.

To move toward a regret-free life one must take action:

Love yourself. You could not live without you. Be pleased with who you are and be grateful for the attributes that you have.

Forgive yourself. Do not harbor grudges against yourself. Everyone makes mistakes. Too many people fail to forgive themselves for the same shortcomings they forgive in others. What makes you so special?

What's past is past. Accept the fact that you cannot change the past. Woulda-coulda-shoulda is irrelevant. The past is only relevant for the lessons you can learn. Do not suffer over and over needlessly for mistakes you made or actions or opportunities you would have, should have, or could have taken. Forget regret. Only the lessons remain relevant.

It's not all about you. Many times bad things happen that are just not your fault. Maybe you have a car accident with perhaps disastrous results that reshape your entire way of life. Humans naturally look for reasons, and all too often we blame ourselves for any bad thing that happens to us. To blame ourselves for occurrences beyond our control is destructive.

All love is good. Do not regret love you gave or love you got. Perhaps it did not turn out like you planned, but that's okay. That period of time that you loved or were loved is precious and not to be regretted, but cherished. Sometimes we fall in love with people who are not interested in us, and that hurts. Sometime we fall in love with people we don't even know. Love is unpredictable. So you'll be sad for a little while - but you're sad because you're alive and in love! - a special time. Savor it and move on.

Life is too short to spend time feeling regret. Learn to push aside regret while retaining life's lessons, and go forward in joy.