Regrets: Do You Have Any?
Regrets? Sure, one or two or maybe more, but who’s counting anyways? Let’s face it, to live, is to also regret. If we don’t get out of bed in the morning, then we’ll never have to worry about regret, except perhaps the fact of not getting out of bed.
Regret is a strange thing. There are always going to be those things we look back upon and wonder why we didn’t act one way or the other. So the problem isn’t so much whether or not we’ll regret, because we will; it’s how we handle our regrets when we have them. Do we let them fester and boil into a slow concoction of worry, fear and anger, or do we take them for what they are: figments of our imagination of what might have been if only we had done this or that – figments of our imagination because we can never know for sure how things would have worked out had we done them differently.
Life is a chain of events. Each link forges the next. Change up one link, and the chain can take up an entirely different direction. That’s the beauty of life. One can never be certain what the next link brings, just as sure that we can never know what would have been had we forged a different chain of events. We can scrutinize; we can examine; we can evaluate, but we can never know for certain what might have been.
What we do know for certain though is that the decisions we make often end up being the links upon which our lives are built (see Make the Right Small Decisions & the Big Ones Take Care of Themselves…). And it’s our ability to learn from those past links that afford us the opportunity to forge the future ones. Regret, in itself, is worthless, but learning from regret: therein lies the key to the road ahead.
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour,” wrote Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942).
True, but used wisely, regret can be our stepping stone to personal growth. It can make us a better spouse, parent, sibling, friend, or colleague. It can make us appreciate and recognize those things we may have neglected or taken for granted. It can make us more alive to the present, thereby helping us prevent a repeat of the past. It can be our gateway to self-awareness.
We must never succumb to regret, for to succumb to regret is to wallow in a life of regret. And certainly there’s no worse way to pass time than to brood over things past, over things which we have no control. Choose this path, and without a doubt, come our final day, our biggest regret will be that we regretted. But choose the path of life, and without a doubt, come our final day, we’ll release a sigh of thanks for all the wonderful things that came to pass…
For more, check out The C.A.T. Principle: Change, Action, Trust – Words to Live By, a Global Ebook Awards GOLD Winner for Best Self-Help Non-Fiction Ebook of 2014, available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. See the latest Amazon reviews here. Now revised and expanded, and once again nominated for the Best Self-Help Non-Fiction Ebook of the 2015 Global Ebook Awards!
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A 2014 Global Ebook Awards GOLD Winner for Best Non-fiction Self-help Ebook.
2015 Global Ebook Awards Nominee for Best Self-Help Non-Fiction Ebook