Feeling--slightly off
Reading-- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Listening to-- nothing

"Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can't build on it; it's only for wallowing in."
~Katherine Mansfield~

My friend Emma is hosting the next edition of the Disability Blog Carnival this Thursday, and her theme is If I Knew Then...

Once I knew what her topic was ideas started coming forth. I could talk about Christina and my regrets in not making more of an effort to see her--even though this winter made it rather harder to get out...I was snowed in for at least a week--before she died unexpectedly. I could talk about my weight gain over the past several years and my current less-active physical therapy regimen as opposed to the more...all-inclusive...active one I had when living in Pocatello. And any number of other regrets I've collected in my near 33 years of living. But then like Mia, in the movie version of The Princess Diaries, I had an epiphany: along with the mind game of "What if...?", regrets (or dwelling on them) are the most useless and self-defeating passtimes for anyone to take part in. Like it says in the quote above, all they are good for is wasting time. All the mind games of "What if...?" that we play and the regrets that we amass are are tools for flogging ourselves with. Our time would be much better spent doing something else! Something positive and constructive!

This was a simple realization, but it blew me away a little. It was simple because once I knew the truth of it, it was easy to see or understand. But the reason it blew me away is I finally see how much time I wasted, how much I beat myself up over things I cannot change or reverse now. Thinking over all the major regrets I have--just in the past decade--it amazed me how frequently I mentally berated myself and bemoaned the choices I made. How often I played the mind games of "If only..." and "What if...?" I drove Heather, and I'm sure, my sister-in-law Jen, nuts with these useless time-wasters. I'm no good at math so I won't bother with trying to calculate how many hours or days or what-have-you I've spent on regrets and these mind games. But I'm guessing it's probably more than a 1/3 of my life.

I now realize how pointless it is to stew and dwell on regrets. The past is...just that: the past! It's done; it's over; it's history. And unless you have a time machine that actually works, in which you can travel back to that moment you regret and change it somehow, there is NOTHING you can do about that choice or action now. All you can do at present is make good use of that regret by learning from it and moving on. The more I think on it, the more I am convinced the feeling of regret is a learning tool. Feeling regret helps us not to repeat a mistake. It's part of the growing process. But to keep the regret alive, using it to flog yourself, that is the time-waster. That is the thief of living in the present.

Simply put: all this rambling comes down to one undeniable truth--the majority of us would be much happier if we would just learn from our regrets, put them in the past where they belong and move on with our lives, never looking back.

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The Writing's on the Wall
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02-22-2010 New Design / Do the Attic

moon phase