It’s all right to have regrets.
I’ll be the first to say that I have — in medical terms — a shit ton.
Regret has become unfashionable in the current “live your best life” wellness cycle… NO ONE admits to having any, and to do so is as if to admit a host of ugly character flaws.
But when people insist they have no regrets, I seriously wonder where they’ve been their whole lives.
To admit regret is to admit that we are fallible, to humbly acknowledge that there are powers in the world that are beyond us; and that sometimes the world we were expecting to see was regrettably far from reality.
Regret is an invitation to experience that disappointing and dissonant reality; something that calls us to a greater sense of accuracy and understanding that there is no sincere engagement with the world where we will not, at some point, be fully and immeasurably let down.
The important question of regret is whether or not we allow it to bring us to a stronger sense of our self, to a less deceptive sense of our world, or if we experience it only as a wound that makes us retreat from further engagement.
Regret is what allows us to step into our future with more sincerity and presence, and to accept the possibility that there’s a future out there that can be lived better than our past.
