The following was inspired by my recent pondering of regret combined with words by the author Matt Haig from his wonderful book, The Midnight Library. With apologies to Matt Haig, my words don’t make his more beautiful, they just make it all more me …The problem with regrets is they come too easy. Perhaps that is the first clue that they aren’t worth holding onto. It’s easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we would’ve developed other talents and said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we would've worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, gone on that big trip, or said yes to the coffee date. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make, the work we didn’t do, the people we didn’t marry, the children we didn’t have. It is easy to regret and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it’s not the life we regret not living that is the real problem. It is regret itself.Regret can fill a life with self-pity and self-loathing. Regrets make us shrivel and wither and feel like we’re our own worst enemy. At first, regret feels like wisdom. But what it really is is presumption. It has us mourning a version of life that will never be tested or proven. You have no way of knowing that any of those other versions of you would have been better or worse. Regret would have you spend precious time pining for a dream you can never catch instead of living the moment that’s already in your hand.I’ve always said there’s never enough time in this one life to do all I want to do and be all I want to be. But lately I’ve begun to question whether that is really true. Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we would feel in any life is here to feel in this life. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every tune to understand the power of music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savor the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays.The truth is we are as completely and utterly alive in this life as we would be in any other. We have access to the same emotional spectrum, so we actually only need to be this one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything when then only thing anyone ever truly wants to be is fully alive.Regret presumes that a life without mistakes is the best possible life. But we are human, and part of being human is being imperfect. Therefore, a perfect human life must be an imperfect human life. As for me, my numerous stumbles and screw ups, my good decisions and bad decisions, whatever understanding or ignorance or hubris or blindness or love or hate or brilliance or idiocy has marked my path—all of it, good and bad, has led me right here, right now. If I had made fewer mistakes it’s quite possible I wouldn’t have Tina—the greatest not-mistake of my existence. Fewer mistakes would’ve meant other turns that would’ve made meeting her impossible and I would not give up knowing her for 10,000 lives of better decisions. Nor would I give up the family that I love and the friends that I simply couldn’t imagine enjoying more.So it turns out regret is overrated. Not missing out on life is not about not screwing up. Not missing out is about not shutting down. Not missing out is about choosing to be fully alive, here and now. We’re imperfect people. We make mistakes. It’s perfectly natural to have regrets, but it’s also perfectly useless to hold onto them. So let’s not. Let’s choose to be alive right where we are. Because wherever you happen to be standing, the sky above you goes on forever. A sky of infinite possibilities means it’s never too late to build yourself a beautiful life.
