TASK 12: REGRETFULLY…
“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” Sydney J. Harris
“I have many regrets, and I’m sure everyone does. The stupid things you do, you regret… if you have any sense, and if you don’t regret them, maybe you’re stupid.” Katharine Hepburn
“Regret is the worst human emotion. If you took another road, you might have fallen off a cliff.” William Shattner
Three types of regret that vex the modern man
Regret is vexing..there several schools of thought regarding regret, as reflected in the above quotations, and basically they fall into these three areas:
- You regret the things that you did NOT do…
- You regret the things that you DID do…
- You don’t regret anything
The things you did not do…
You can’t change anything in life. Once it’s done, it’s done, so why regret anything? Why trouble yourself?
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All three make some sense…my old man believed strongly that you would only regret those things in life that you did not do. He had different ways of saying it, i.e. if he was drinking he’s say: “do that shit now while you’re young, and you won’t wake up one day and wish you had…”, which came out like this when he was sober: “you don’t want to look back when you’re 40 and wish you’d tried something when you were 25…”
It was sensible advice, but I think it came from a place where he was castigating himself for something he didn’t do when he was young. Sure enough, one night as we sat on the porch and he puffed on his Kent cigarette and pulled at his PBR, he told me about his regrets. My dad missed out on this opportunity to take a job as a rep for a paint pigment firm (yes there is such a thing–they sell pigments, chemicals really, to big companies who sell enormous quantities of paint to other big companies who use a shit-load of paint, like Ford or Chevy); he didn’t take the job because it meant moving to California. He passed on it, and for some reason that stuck in his craw. So I took on a lot when I was young just so I wouldn’t regret it later…
The things you do…
Other people, like my mom, felt strongly that you regret the things you do, because once you’ve done ’em, they’re done, and you can’t un-done ’em. Make sense? Sure it does. I sure as hell regret some of the poor, low-down, despicable and awful things that I’ve done to other people…
I have a buddy, Tom, who worked at a bar and took advantage of the access to free booze to drink while he worked; it got out of hand, and one night he drove a co-worker home, only he didn’t make it home–he drove off the road and plowed through a random garage about two minutes from his co-worker’s apartment, and the co-worker ended up with a broken leg and he ended up with a DUI conviction. Oh, and he got sued too… Is that something he should regret? Hell yes! And he does.
He got sober and grew up and got married and had kids and made some money and had a normal life, except that every once in a while he’ll be driving down that street and see that garage and pangs of regret well up in his throat…I don’t have a story as dramatic as that, but I do have regrets…
Nothing to regret…
Or you don’t regret anything, like Mr. Shattner says, although one would have to wonder if he’d have a regret or two if he hadn’t gone to the audition for Star Trek and someone else had got the part…but he has a point. You can’t change anything in life. Once it’s done, it’s done, so why regret anything? Why trouble yourself? You could walk down a street and turn right and have a piano land on your head or turn left and find a twenty dollar bill on the ground. So why regret?
As for me, I tried to write down what I regret most about my life, because yes, I do regret. And listing my regrets helped me face them, and more importantly, put them in context, as laid out by Mr. Beckham:
“I don’t regret anything, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t look back and think, ‘What was I thinking?” David Beckham
TASK
Where do you fall? If you have regret what you didn’t do, write down what you didn’t do. If you regret what you did do, write down the things that you did, and if you don’t have any regrets, write down I DON’T HAVE ANY REGRETS, and think about whether that’s true or not…
Photo courtesy of Joe Doe