Regrets? I’ve had a few. But then again, too many to mention.
Not quite how the song goes? Well, you have your version and I have mine. But whether too few or too many, the idea that regrets should not be mentioned is not a refusal to deal with the past, but an acknowledgment that mistakes have been made and that we must move on. Holding onto regrets will put you in stasis. Living in old regrets keeps you from living life now.
I always find myself saying, “If I could go back, I would do such and such.“ Intellectually, I know I cannot go back. Emotionally, I yearn for that more than anything. Since it is not going to happen, I need to swing my vision around 180 degrees and look forward.
As we get older, we find our options narrowing. We see time collapsing before our eyes. All long range plans become short term plans, with those becoming even shorter. It is time to shift gears and use my regrets not as self–flagellation but as a guide for living well in whatever remaining years, months or days I have left.
In my years before today I put great stock in the accumulation of things. Somehow I thought that was the road to happiness. I bought into the idea that he who dies with the most toys, wins. This is a regret, for now I know that the experiences in life hold value that things never will, never could.
I find myself wanting to dump the “things” in my life like a shed skin. I look around and ask myself, “Why do I have that?” Too often I can find no reason that stands up to an honest evaluation. More and more I want to “have” to live, not live to have. I am starting to falter under this burden of “stuff.”
My mother comes to mind at the moment. She went through a period, probably about this same time in her life, where she started divesting herself of all sorts of things that she had “outgrown.” She gave away or sold books, antiques, furniture – nothing was safe. It’s not like she cleaned out the house, more like she was lightening the load on her being. Perhaps she felt as I do now.
I have the queerest urge to scale down my stuff and my expenses to the absolute minimum so that I can enjoy the doing of things rather than the dealing with things. It almost sounds like the typical retirement dream; buy a motor-home and travel the country. Well, what’s wrong with that? How much longer will I be able to do something like that? Will not doing it just become a current regret?
Perhaps it is the butterfly in me coming out. I hope it is because I am starting to feel suffocated in this chrysalis.