Sometimes I hear people say that they live life without regrets.
I never believe these people.
I don't think it's possible to go through life past the age of five and not have something you regret. It might just be regretting that you ordered chocolate instead of strawberry milk, but there has to be something you regret.
I regret many, many things.
When I was a child I always imagined that I was a good guy, the best kind of guy, for no other reason than I'd never had any evidence otherwise. As I got older opportunities for selfish or cruel or thoughtless behavior presented themselves and, like a normal person, I took advantage of these situations. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. My self image became something much more negative, I began to hate myself, to despise the sort of person I had become.
I eventually learned that all people can be selfish or cruel or careless, and that I was not quite as monstrous as I imagined myself to be. I learned that while I was not the perfectly good and nice person I imagined as a child, I also was not an amoral monster who deserved nothing but derision and spite. This, I think, is just part of growing as a person, coming to terms with some of your own failures and not hating yourself for them.
But I still regret them.
Not everything I regret is due to me consciously making "evil" decisions. Some of the things I regret are just mistakes I made that now, with the perfect clarity of hindsight, seem utterly foolish.
But it's more the idea of regret that I'm mulling over right now. Regret is a strange sort of emotion, isn't it? It's not sadness, it isn't anger. It's a sort of a combination of the both. When I feel regret I imagine a wet, soaking rag, trickling streams of emotion sopping off of a tired and worn out frame. Regret is a thief of motivation and positive thinking. It's a morass that catches one's mind and leeches the feeling out of it.
Regret is painful, but it's the pain of old wounds, a sore knee brought about by the cold weather. It's poking your tongue into the old hole where a tooth once was a feeling a lack of what should be a presence.
The most insidious thing about regret is how comforting it can be.
For many years of my life I made a friend of regret. I took a cold comfort in lamenting over the bad choices I had made and found ease in blaming those decisions for why I was living the way I was. I won't go into details but rest assured it was not a good way of living. Regret formed a cold, numbing blanket over my mind and heart, insulating me from any more pain or joy, rendering all choices down to avoidances (that is not a word.)
I think that regret can become a habit, something that gives you an excuse, "I made this bad move, now all the options are bad and I can do nothing to fix them." You can live your whole life in regret, I think many people do. I think that other people see them doing this and then lie to themselves and others, claiming that they don't have any regrets.
But everyone had regrets, as dangerous as living in eternal regret can be, I think that living in denial of your regrets can be almost as bad. If you cannot admit to yourself that you sometimes make the bad choice, or even wonder what your life would have been like if you had made a different choice, even if it had not been a bad one, then you're living in denial, and even the Greeks said you should know yourself better than that.
So regret. What is it? I know I used some flowery imagery to explain it earlier, but I think it boils down to longing. It's a longing for what might have, could have, should have been. It's a relaization that there are ponts in everyone's life where choices, irreversible choices, are made and some paths open while others close forever as a result of these choices. It's the sad truth that we only have this one life to live and there are no save game files so you can see the other way it could have turned out. It's that desire to see what sort of person you could have been if things had turned out differently.
I think some regret is healthy for a person. At least I hope it is, because I have plenty. But I have worked hard to escape the burdensome comfort of my regret and try to turn it into a tool. I can imagine what sort of person I may have been had things gone differently, while realizing how interesting the things that did happen to me are and how the person I am now is the only person I can be now. I can use my regrets and lessons, and go forward into life adapting that experience to make sure that when I wind up with regrets, at least I'll end up with the right ones.
