The Power of Regrets

No matter where your life is or what your life is, choosing it changes everything.  When the landscape of your hopes and dreams lies stretched behind and familiar places shimmer in the distant past, it's easy to be filled with dark, torturous thoughts of regret.  Life's failures and misfortunes can be so painful, so frightening, we want to forget them, hide them, deny them.  Rather than making them an accommodation, accepting and growing, we bury them.  Regrets put us outside ourselves; they divorce us from our egos and force us to see the larger picture, to recognize that our choices are in fact a tapestry and each choice is a thread in the vivid weave, yet each thread is essential to the integrity of the cloth.  I don't regret having regrets.  They remind me where things went wrong.  Be it bad choices, missed opportunities, failure in risk or relationships, they display my shortcomings, allowing me to learn from my mistakes, my neglects, correcting them, and bettering myself as a man, a father, a partner.  They enable me to see the next opportunity, reminding me to seize it and not let it slip away.  Looking back is painful, for we are human, we are imperfect people.  We make inexorable choices which hurt ourselves and others.  We want to ignore our mistakes, our imperfections, our failures.  Often, the only way to make peace is to remember the past.

Regrets motivate me to be a better person.  I value little moments that I understood to be important, but sometimes failed to live out.  Moments with my daughters, moments with the love of my life, moments with friends and family.  Life is about treasuring people and demonstrating this to them.  It's creating environments for your children to dream big dreams, to experience the joy of living, granting them opportunities to build wonderful memories.  Life is found in loving someone and giving everything you have to that individual and bettering their world.  And it's discovered by assisting others, making a difference, helping them become who they want to be.  In such acts, one finds fulfillment, true and enduring fulfillment.

Looking at the past, examining regrets, teaches me to never give up.  When you fail, when you fall down, pull yourself up, wipe the blood from your wounds, bandage them, and move forward.  There will be scars.  Permit those scars to remind you of what hurts, what hinders, what wounds.  Allow them to become a levy of protection from life's storms, shielding you from people who want to hurt you, discourage you, destroy you.  Never let them deter you from reaching for everything God has for you.  Though scarred, you can recover, by being honest, admitting failures and weakness, apologizing and choosing to live a life not of perception, of image, but one of honesty, integrity, not immune from failure or setbacks, but one that acknowledges them when they come and in turn ensures that the compartmentalization of two different lives, word and deed, merge into one.

There will always be inequity in life.  It rains on the just and the unjust, the rich and the poor, the happy and the sad.  Life is not fair.  It never will be.  One child dies in Haiti, one survives.  One wife gets cancer and succumbs to a horrid disease, leaving a husband and child with unanswered questions and broken hearts.  Another survives, experiencing a long healthy life, leaving a husband and child with a beautiful family intact.  Some men are killed in war, some wounded, some survive.  Life is unfair.  We must live with this in mind, value our relationships and make the most of our dreams and our hopes.  Life is not fortuitous.  Life is what we create with what we have and are given by God.

Remembering will lead to memories.  Memories join the past to the future.  They are for those moments when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are; they pave the road to where you want to be.  By looking back, you see a glimpse of where you've been, and see a hint of where you're headed.  Regrets, losing, failure, parts of the past, bring enormous pain.  They also make us more resilient.  Without them, we might have more, but we would be less.

The beginning of the end lies in remembrance.  We are not very good at remembering.  Our endless capacity to focus on the future rather than the past is one of our great national virtues.  It's also one of our great national vices.  Though we hardly seem to note it, even in passing, some things must rest at the forefront of our consciousness.  Don't underestimate the power of that revelation.  The past isn't where you die, it's where you find out that you get to keep on living.