I’m always suspicious
of people who declare that they have no regrets.
I bet you know
someone who has stated, with a sense of pride: “If I had to do it all again, I
wouldn’t change anything.”
Really? Sure about that? You wouldn’t decide to wear a different dress
to your mate’s 21st so you didn’t turn up wearing the same thing as his
girlfriend? You wouldn’t have avoided that pothole so you didn’t hit a tree and
write off your car? You wouldn’t have ended your dead-end relationship sooner
so you could have been happier earlier? You wouldn’t have applied sunscreen
every single day so you didn’t end up with an alarming amount of wrinkles in
your 30s? (That sunscreen song from the 90s was right about UV protection, you
know).You wouldn’t change anything?
I don’t believe you.
Let me tell you, there isn’t much I wouldn’t change if
I could.
I would back myself and aim higher in my career instead of opting to
float in the achievement-free zone of freelancing, so that I would have
something to show for the past five years, to name just one.
I totally understand that everything that has happened has shaped my
life and my character for the better, and that I couldn’t have learned the
lessons I’ve learned any other way. The suffering was necessary then, but it is
not necessary now. I also understand that regret is unhealthy – not to mention
unhelpful, considering we have no means of turning back time (still hanging out
for that time-machine technology, Doc).
I know all this, and
yet I still have regrets – but I don’t regard that as a bad thing.
Personally, I don’t
think there’s anything wrong with acknowledging that things have not worked out
the way you had hoped. I do agree, though, that holding on to pain around what’s
happened will hold you back.
So here’s my approach.
Instead of embarking on a futile mission to embrace all that shitty stuff, I’m
working on acceptance. I can’t change what I’ve done, or what’s been done to
me, but I absolutely can change how much I let those things affect me now. I
see acceptance as a middle ground between celebrating unsavoury events and
languishing in regret. What this means is freedom from self-flagellation over
my choices, without labouring under the delusion that I should* be happy about
things that did not, and never will, make me happy.
It’s possible to be
grateful for the lessons while still wishing their circumstances had been
different.
If something sucks, I’m
not going to pretend otherwise. You can’t put glitter on a poo, as an old
editor of mine used to say (he was talking about a poorly written story, but
the same message applies here). This doesn’t mean playing the ‘if only’ game
though. Everything is not awesome, but it is
OK. Maybe we should just focus on that.
*I hate the word ‘should’ – it’s loaded with so much expectation
and a sense that you are failing at something – and I use it sparingly. In this
case I think it was warranted.