My birthday was this week, and with a birthday (at least for me) comes a certain amount of reflection over the state of things and the ground that has been covered so far. Generally speaking it was a great birthday week, with one exception. I have struggled a lot in recent years with regret. This year was no different. Of all the things I’ve learned to navigate in life, regret is one of the most challenging for me.The dictionary defines regret as “a troubling emotion focused on the belief that some event from the past could have been changed in order to produce a more desirable outcome.” Yep, nailed it. I know those troubling emotions all too well. I’ve made plenty of mistakes and I have plenty of regrets.I’ll confess right now that I’ve not resolved the problem of my regrets. But during this last lap around the sun I feel like I may have made a little progress. One of the things that I’ve realized in dealing with regret is how important it is to accept a very humbling fact about myself …Though I have many beliefs that some event from the past could have been changed to produce a more desirable outcome, I actually have no idea how life would’ve gone if things had been different. Except, of course, that it would be different.But knowing it would be different is not the same as knowing if it would be better or worse. I can’t know better or worse. I can only know it would be different. They say hindsight is 20/20 but is that really true? I don’t think so. Hindsight is not truly sight at all. When I think about the past I’m not actually seeing at it. I’m just thinking about it. And I don’t have the brain power or the necessary information to ever know how life would’ve actually turned out if things had gone differently. Imagining what could’ve gone better is not the same as knowing it would’ve gone better.So, what exactly do I know about my past if things had gone different?Honestly … nothing.Where does that leave me? Well, it doesn’t remove any of my regrets. I still have them. I always will. I’ve made mistakes that I’d rather not have made. That’s a fact. But what’s not a fact is whether not making those mistakes would’ve made my life better or worse right now. As much as my imagination would like to tell me otherwise, that is something I just cant know.So perhaps the role of regret is to learn from my mistakes so I make room in my life for all new mistakes instead of making the same old ones over and over again. I that sense regret can lead to wisdom. But as for the rest of it, perhaps I should stop beating myself up about the consequences of those mistakes as if I somehow know that things would be better without them. I don’t know that. I can’t know that. So maybe I should stop pretending that I do.No matter what the past may be, what I do know is that right now I’m living an entirely new moment. And this moment right now is really, truly, actually, all there is. So for my next lap around the sun I think I will try to make as many new choices and new memories as possible by not living in the past but being fully here, right now. And if the regrets of the past help me to have fewer regrets in the future, then the future looks pretty good, and I just might be on my way to building myself a beautiful life.