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I think I will respectfully disagree, relying as I do on the wisdom of Darius Rucker.
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Maybe for some people. I think for others it’s a way of sugar coating their memories. We all know you can’t change the past. The Arrow of Time’s a bastard and then you die. Regret isn’t a decision (the moment someone invents a flux capacitor I will eat my words), it’s a feeling, the undercurrent kind that you carry beneath the current of transitory feelings. I like my regrets. I don’t just regret any old thing. I choose my regrets carefully. So far I have eight. It’s not a list of stuff I’d change in the past. It’s a list of things I will absolutely do differently in the future. They’re the handful of errors that I so thoroughly learned from that I don’t need to enumerate them when making new decisions, because they’re warning signs that are part of my very personality now.
To say nothing good has come from my regrets would be nonsense. Setting aside all the good things that resulted from the convergence of them and my other choices, the very lessons they taught me are invaluable. That’s why I carry them with me, not some silly masochism.
But most people who say they have no regrets don’t sound like they’re saying the wouldn’t alter their past. They sound like they’re trying to feel good about it. A life well lived is one you feel both good and bad about. Ignoring the bad is not only foolish; it’s ignoring an entire side of life.
Time travel into the past is for science fiction. Regrets are for traveling into the future.
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Do we, though?
Try telling that to the FAUXTUS.
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Well, okay, all of us who live in the real world. You make a good point though; I really need to stop underestimating the degree to which some people don’t live in the real world. You think I’d have learned by now.
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We all do, methinks.
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There’s still a stubborn part of me that looks at the people we share this planet with and thinks: You have roughly the same number of axons as me, we share the vast majority of genes, and we grew up on the same planet, so surely you can’t be as stupid, crazy and generally off your rocker as you seem!
Decades of trying to excise that lurking sentiment has met with very limited success.
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When I consider that we’re all connected and all made basically of the same stuff I feel both awed and nauseous, simultaneously; because that means that I’m only 6 or 7 people removed from the Dalai Lama and from the worst dregs of humanity, also known as the 45th president.
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Man o day do I cherish those 6 or 7 though. They’re the thin line between me and the abyss (or nirvana, but you win some, you lose some).
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You had my like at Edith Piaf, but…
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“There’s a love I remember that I once told good-bye,
and when she’d departed I was too lost to cry.
There’s a love I remember for a place and a time,
but it’s gone like the trains that once passed in the night.”
–Craig Johnson “Goodbye to The Lowlands”
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As an editor, I have to say that the audio and color on this video is really terrible for a magazine with so much money. Looks (and sounds) like something an unpaid intern did.
Proposal:
Regret is a uniquely human construct, tied to our enhanced ability to envision a world in which things are not as they are, but as they “could have been.” As far as I know, other animals do not wrack themselves with regret-fueled angst, because they are taking in the sensory world as it comes at them and dealing with it as a reality, not as a possibility.
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Having just arrived, I don’t feel comfortable expressing personal regrets, but I will freely admit I have plenty to regret. I like to learn new things. It comes with the territory.
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smoking
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I love your whole comment; it summed up my own feelings about my regrets better than I could have done.
But I don’t curate mine as beautifully as you do; on some level I collect a new regret or two every day I’m alive. Somehow I still manage to be a generally happy person. I guess I manage to let go of the minor regrets pretty easily, so they don’t accumulate into a gigantic, crippling mass of crap that I drag around for the rest of my life, like this guy:
But even though I’m comfortably blessed with what some Heinlein character termed “a trained forgettery,” there are still a number of regrets I’ll never lose, and thank god I don’t have the chance to live my life over again knowing what I do now, because if I were ever faced with the choice between avoiding some of those regrets and the certain knowledge that doing so would sufficiently change my life to prevent my own children from being born…
Thank god I’ll never, ever have to make that choice.
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