Regrets Only

There was a small discussion the other night about regretting things. Someone mentioned that saying you have no regrets is a very brave thing to say. Plus when you say it, it makes you seem as though you have been and remain in total command of your life from the minute you were born, and people want to flow you a share of admiration for it. The state of having no regrets appears to be admirable. The condition seems to be something to strive for.

And yet some of us wondered...

Though it may be seen as a position of strength to say you can look back and find nothing you regret, there is an aspect of that that seems a bit of the old macho posturing. "Femacho", then, if you are a female. Sometimes it sounds like a self-justifying thing. Almost as if to say "I've made no mistakes in my life."

Examining our own lives, and being honest about it, we came to the conclusion that the chances were somewhat reasonable that if you have no regrets you've concurrently also had no life. Nothing to show for anything up or down. You haven't really experienced the full deal of life. This idea that you're going to strike a pose in front of people and willfully declare that there's nothing at all you would do differently... becomes not only unreal but also insupportable, in my opinion.

I have regrets. A couple are big ones. A state of "should have" is part of my history in certain areas. But it may be moderated by the degree with which it haunts you. Because, certainly, if the haunting is strong enough it is seen as a definite sign of weakness in your personality or something.

Things pop into my head in the middle of nowhere that make me feel a bit guilty over a specific thing I'd done, and once in a while I get a full bore regret session with myself about a way I treated someone or a choice I walked away from. That may be the degree people talk about when they see it as a weakness, I suppose. Don't dwell on it, they say. Move on. There's no changing the past. You can't turn back the clock. If you do a memory scan you should be concentrating on the good things, not the regrets.

I think regret is one of the things at the heart of creativity. What are the blues we sing, anyway, but something we regret? I think the bad part comes if you let it stop you, or if you allow it to ruin the positive things you have in your life now. But regret itself isn't necessarily a sickness.

If you don't have regrets you either haven't really lived, or it's just you want people to think you've got it together - which is ego. Unless you've had a blessed life in every respect, I seriously doubt you have no regrets.

And saying you have none is probably a cover up.