"Regrets? Don’t Regret Anything,
Unless You Want Me To Slap You When You Are Old"
by John Wilder
"I’ve never written anything before that made me want to go to a hospice and slap a bunch of old dying people, but this particular post led me there. I’ll explain. It’s okay, it’ll all make sense in the end. I’m a trained professional.
I have made many mistakes in my life. Most of them I don’t remember – they were small and didn’t have any consequences, or at least any consequences I’ve seen yet.
Then there were some slightly larger mistakes – let’s call them medium size mistakes. There have been consequences to these. Again, medium-sized mistakes most often lead to medium-sized consequences. A scar here (carve away from your thumb, not towards it), a stock gone to zero there (thanks a lot, Enron®) and one really bad car trade when I was 24 . . . medium-sized. Medium-sized mistakes are big enough for a big sting, but whatever permanent impacts there might be aren’t immediately fatal.
The biggest ones – I won’t give a laundry list of those. Most of those were where either passion, inexperience, a momentary lapse of character or judgement, or (worst of all) when all three contributed to a mistake. Some mistakes lasted longer, some were short. But all stung. The biggest include a marriage that led to divorce, underestimating a sociopathic boss, and wearing that white dress to my little sister’s wedding. I mean, I look fabulous in it, but some brides just have to be the center of attention. Also a bit weird because she wasn’t really my sister.
To put it bluntly, I am the author of almost every problem I have. If I didn’t cause the problem, I’m probably complicit in creating the problem or not dealing with the problem. But I don’t regret it. None of it. Not the victories, certainly, and not the failures. Why?
Life is a one-shot deal. And life is a ratchet. It only turns one way – we can’t take anything back. Regret isn’t a one-shot deal, though. If there’s anything that will burn a hole in your soul, it’s regret. Regret never comes alone – it brings guilt along for the ride.
If I were to dig more deeply into those feelings – regret and guilt are just ways that fear manifests itself. Fear of... what? Regret is a fear that the consequences of your choices or actions will impact you negatively, and cannot be changed. Here is a list of some of the common regrets from people on their deathbed (from a former palliative care nurse named Bronnie Ware, and, yes, I spelled that right – blame her parents, not me):
“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
“I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
“I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
“I wish that I had let myself be happier.”
Even a quick look at this list tells me one simple thing: regret is for losers. I have never seen a whinier pack of self-serving weakness since I last watched a Democratic presidential debate. Everything, absolutely everything on this “top five” list is just, well, sad.
Would you like to go to your grave worrying about any of those things? I can’t imagine doing it. I refuse to let regret rule me. And I refuse to let any decision I made twenty years ago rule me. Hell, I refuse to let any decision I made last week rule me, except for choosing that convenience store egg/muffin sandwich – I don’t need to explain why. Deal with the consequences? Certainly. But regret? No.
Not living a life “true to yourself”? I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life. I was talking with a guy the other day who quit his job because his boss asked him to do something illegal. That’s being true to yourself – he walked away without a paycheck but with his values and beliefs intact. If you’re not being true to yourself, you’re either weak or flighty. The good news? Anyone who reads this blog is neither.
Wishing you hadn’t “worked so hard”? That’s also nonsense. A soul thrives on doing good work that matters. Doing good work excellently is hard. The Mrs. teaches, and works hard at it – I can see from her talking about her students, talking about the ones who learned and improved, the ones who keep coming back to her classroom to report on their lives that her work matters. Working hard at work that matters is what makes us the best humans we can be. If you think you worked too hard, you weren’t doing anything worth doing. The good news? Change now. You have an entire lifetime to fix that mistake.
Didn’t have the “courage to express my feelings”? Wow. This is the weakest on the list, so far. Number one: do you have feelings that matter? Most feelings are stupid – and I have stupid feelings, too. Thankfully, I’m not a five year old – I am at least twelve. I get to examine my feelings and reject those that don’t reflect my values, my virtue, my beliefs. I get to choose. If I feel slighted by something silly or petty? I get to choose to understand what a fool I’m being and ignore that feeling. Again, if you don’t express your feelings, that’s not always a bad thing. Your feelings are often stupid.
I’m sorry that “staying in touch with your friends” was so hard. But it’s really not. The people you care about, that care about you, are there. They always have been, they always will be. I don’t Facebook® much – why? I call my friends, on an actual phone. I text my friends. Am I often the one that calls first? Sure. Do we develop different lives, does life pull us away for a while? Do hundreds or thousands of miles separate us? Maybe. But I make quite a few phone calls. And mostly my friends pick up. Sure, it’s true that the biggest miracle Jesus exhibited in the Bible was having 12, 11 close friends (thanks, Judas) after the age of thirty – but you just need a few – a few that will have your back. A few you can share with.
Seriously – number five on the list is a wish for “letting themselves be happier.” Happy is easy ("All You Will Ever Need To Read About How To Be Happy* (*Most of the Time")), being significant is hard. It requires hard work while being true to yourself. It requires expressing those feelings that your virtue allows to exist. Friends? The good ones will be with you forever, and you can restart your conversations with the slightest hint of time passing, even if you haven’t talked regularly in a decade, if they’re true friends.
I’ve never thought about going to a hospice and slapping someone, but this list made me want to do it. I know, I know, it’s too late for them. And this is the list of people who had regrets. People like me? I don’t have a single regret at this moment of my life. Not one. In a hospice, I hope I’d be the, “Regrets? No. More clam chowder, please,” guy.
To be clear – it’s not that I don’t care. It’s not that I’m not blameless. It’s not that I was always right. Not one of those things is true. But I have done the most important thing I can think of: When I do something I regret, I’ve changed myself so that I won’t ("Clintoncide", "John Bolton’s Waifu", and "October Market Crashes: Knock on Wood") do that thing again. I cannot change the past. But if I have learned, if I can help others not make the same mistakes while not repeating my own mistake? Like an algebra teacher for the soul, I have taken something negative and turned it into something positive. The bonus is I get to end the dreams of high school freshmen in the process.
And I’m not planning on having any regrets tomorrow. If you have regrets? Fix them now or recognize them for the dead weight they are and cut them loose. The alternative? Trust me, you don’t want to have me chasing you down in a hospice and slapping you silly."
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