People you have met may think of you as the greatest loser and asshole they have ever come across. For you, that same incident woke you up perhaps, enlightened you, and dug a real sense of integrity into your hide that you believed you had had long before you messed up so badly. Regrets are precious commodities, cornerstones of your character. You would not be you without them. I know--as much as plenty of people will disagree with me--you are a finer person because of every single thing you regret.
Regret what you have not done. You will never find out what would have happened had you taken that trip on the Trans Siberian Express. No regret is more horrible than the "I wish I had done that," type. "I wish I had talked to that girl 20 years ago." Awful!
As brilliant as our noodle may be, we cannot figure out intellectually what we can find out practically. We can't predict the future of markets, relationships, or anything else. We cannot predict the response of a stranger we are interested in talking with. Mind over matter? Yeah, right. We can't even predict the next move of a damn cricket we're struggling to get out of the house. In most cases, we must DO things to discover what works. Doing allows us also to access the enjoyable. You can't "do it" in your mind. You ought to practically do what you are after to see if you like doing it or not. Sure, with action things get messy and that's what we prefer to prevent by playing it safe. As human beings we will never be safe. If it's legal, go do what you have in mind or you are in hell already--literally--in the hell of "I wish I had tried that."
Doing what you have not done is easier said than done, obviously. Otherwise you would have done it. You gained something from not doing those things. At least, you believe you benefited from not doing it. You didn't risk losing your inheritance or the family jewels, for instance. You could have attracted HIV or knocked up more moms than your budget permits. Yet you don't know. None of those terrible things may have happened had you followed your dreams. Maybe and maybe not. You will never know. The benefits of not acting are baseless beliefs for the most part, justifications to compensate for missing out. And you are right: hideous things could have happened in the wake of your unlived life's activities.
Consider this: in a lot of instances we don't know what's crowned with the better outcome until we act. We must choose if we prefer to die in bed, eventually, or on the "battlefield of our dreams." Once that is settled your regrets will stop. If you chose the "bed" option, you don't have to worry about not doing anything. Doing stuff and risking your toupe to shift positions is just not for you. If you picked "battlefield," you won't have time to contemplate doing or not doing, to regret or not to regret. You'll burn in the middle of it.
Regretting mistakes you have made in the past is a waste of time. Nothing can be changed. You did what you did and no regret can undo it. I suspect our regrets are internalized actions of self-punishment. Mom told us to feel bad after messing up, and regret is the adult equivalent of her asking us to stand in the corner for awhile, to think about what heinous crimes we committed. Perhaps we were grounded for our mistakes, and regrets do just that: self-grounding immobilizes us and we become inactive. Think about your three most grave screw ups in your life and chances are you'll be paralyzed and useless for the rest of the day.
Adults may indulge in self-punishment by ways of regrets, but mature it is not. Procrastination has its beneficial sides--and I am the first to defend procrastination--but denying ourselves the joy of life because we are so busy feeling bad is pretty dumb. You are regretting mistakes you have made in the past? You are wasting precious time. Grow up, and make more mistakes.
Relationships are messy, and so are our relationships with our own mistakes. Mistakes are results of actions with a different turnout than the one we anticipated. When the result is better than what we had planned, we don't call it mistake. Some of us thank God for that stuff or we call it luck, but we don't take full credit. Well, kinda depends whom we are talking with. When results are worse than the achievement we had in mind, we feel solely responsible for the outcome or worse: guilty. We don't thank God for it, neither do we blame God. Why? Since I don't peddle religion nor its opposite, I shall leave the answer up to you.
As poor as our judgment has been historically, it's not probable that a high percentage of our actions yields exactly the results we had in mind. My wild guess, in most cases we were wrong. Honestly, results deviating in any way from our plans are mistakes, and it matters not if they are better or worse than what we wanted. In both cases our judgment is off, and we are responsible for the surprising outcome. Wrigley's chewing gum was a mistake: they did not plan to make money selling chewing gum. The gum was a freebie in their packages of baking soda. Moral: be happy and grateful for both kinds of mistakes. Or, if your world contains a God, thank God for all deviations, for your lucky breaks and for your most embarrassing screw ups. Love thy mistakes as you would an ugly child.
Mistakes are the bread and butter of our lives. Chances are most things we do will reveal themselves as mistakes because it's not probable to judge life correctly much more often than 50% of the time. If you are better, play roulette and you should do well for yourself. It is not that easy to predict the future. Of course, if you don't start anything new, you can't do much wrong. Holding down the same job for 30 years doesn't leave you much of a chance to make grave mistakes. Well, unless getting that job 30 years ago was the dumbest thing you ever did. Let's assume more than half of our business ventures and decisions are wrong, and we can't figure out which half is bad BEFORE we act. We decide to
a) never make a decision again and refrain from any and all action
b) hope to get lucky with our next move; if that fails, we never do anything new again and feel like a loser for the rest of our miserable days
c) increase our failure rate: we increase our output of ideas and action, and we radically increase frequency of possible mistakes
As the bible says, "Love thy mistakes as thyself and make more of them more often--or hang yourself young." Mistakes are crucial elements of life in freedom, if not the most important ones. How free would you be if everything you did, I mean everything, had to bring no less than perfect results? Twenty years from now, even in hindsight, planning, execution, and outcome would have to look immaculate from your perspective and from everybody else's point of view.
You would not be able to live another day. You'd be afraid to pull up your pants in the morning. If the making of mistakes were out of the question, all of us would be inhibited little creeps, too scared to say a word. And damned, in some ways we are like that, scared of life and of the pathetic opinion of people we don't care about.
There is no freedom for you without the freedom to make mistakes. Freedom requires mistakes. Freedom can thrive only in an environment where you can do things wrongly. It's not pretty, nice, or pleasant. Freedom is a painful thing, and you better enjoy it, baby.
Egbert
