Do You Have Regrets?
Something close to a position of ‘no regrets’ — making a choice and living with the consequences — is easy to adopt for me. But is an absolute ‘no regrets’ policy too close to callousness?
A few years ago I got divorced. (I am now very happy with a new partner.) This led to a number of changes, most especially in relationships. A surprising number of people, for instance, felt that they could not remain friends with both me and my ex-wife.
No Way to Compare
At the time a number of people asked me if I thought that I was better off for being divorced. I found this a difficult question to answer. Firstly, I didn’t feel like I had the energy to continue — so it wasn’t an issue. Secondly, there were so many factors to consider. How to weigh the consequences for friendships against my ex-wife’s reactions and my own responses? Would it have been possible to continue and improve the relationship? (I didn’t feel I had the energy to continue, but perhaps I was wrong.) How much improvement would have been possible? Thirdly I realised that there was no ‘parallel me’ walking around — I couldn’t know what would have happened if I’d stayed in the relationship, and I couldn’t compare it with my current life. There wasn’t another Evan who had kept living my old life to compare my new life with. For these reasons I felt that to decide if I was better off was a difficult question to answer.
No Regrets
This is close to a position of ‘no regrets’ — you make your choices and live with the consequences. As Solomon said, “Do not ask why former days were better than these; it is not from wisdom that you ask this”! This is a stance that is easy to adopt for me, just to decide and get on with it.
And yet, sometimes I do have regrets. Just telling myself that I shouldn’t have them isn’t likely to lead to much insight or understanding.
Regrets
Usually I think our regrets are because we believe we could have done something else. We want to go back and re-do what we did — to voice our anger differently, to assert our need more strongly, to leave a relationship sooner or stay longer. On occasion something like this may be possible. Our regret may motivate us to learn to voice our anger differently or to re-establish a relationship. We can’t re-do the past, but we may be able to behave differently in the present, including in relationships that have continued into the present from our past.
Sometimes, I think, we regret something even though we recognise we couldn’t have done anything else. I find this much harder to know what to do with. Common advice is to realise that we can’t change the past, to realise that what’s done is done and so forth. These are truisms.
They are truisms that I feel uncomfortable with. I feel that an absolute ‘no regrets’ policy lies perilously close to callousness. So I’d like to examine regret a little.
For me regret involves a comparison, a comparison between what I did or didn’t do with what I could have done or not done. The comparison can be a moral one (what I did or didn’t do compared with what I should have done or not done), but this needn’t be the case: I may regret that I didn’t get the job or that the meeting took longer than it could have, and no moral dimension is involved.
Desire
Regret is bound up with the desire for a situation, or my response to it, to be different to how it was. If nothing else, regret alerts us to a desire that we have. This may be information that is worth having. We may find that we want to live more harmoniously with others, or assert our difference more firmly, or want meetings to run more efficiently.
If we listen to our regrets then we may learn about our desires and values. We can’t change the past, but our regrets may give us information about the direction that we want to head in the future. It may be futile to try to change the past, but if we listen to our regrets we may learn more about who we are.
Do you have regrets? Have you learned from them? Or, have you found that dwelling on them is just a waste of time? I’d like to hear your experience in the comments.
8 Responses (One Discussion Thread) to “Do You Have Regrets?”
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What a great topic to raise for discussion Evan. You’ve made some very helpful insights here. In particular, the relationship between regret and desire is a useful connection to make I think. I like the idea that regret can alert us to desires we may have been unaware of and thereby enlarge our self understanding and speak into our future decisions and priorities. It gives regret the potential to be genuinely constructive in our lives – not something I would normally give it credit for.
The antithesis to the wisdom you have shared here is the stupid phrase “it’s all good”. This quip annoyed me the first time I ever heard it and it still drives me nuts – especially since you almost always hear it when the absolute opposite is patently true! You know how it goes: “Yeah, my house burnt down, and I’ve lost me job and the missus has run off with me best mate cause I forgot her birthday, but ya know, it’s no worries. It’s ALL GOOD.” What?? Like %^#@ it is!!
So you see I don’t know if an ‘absolute no regrets policy’ is close to callousness – it may well be – but I think it must also be close to embodying the “unexamined life” that, as Plato said, “is not worth living”!
Thanks for giving me some nutritious food for thought. L.
Thanks Lyndal, it’s always great to know that I have given food for thought. Many thanks for your comment.
Hi Evan,
I think if it weren’t for regrets I would not only have no forward movement, but I’d repeat everything the same way forever. And I have repeated, at the various ‘advices’ I’ve gotten from others,i.e.,ya gotta move on, crying over spilled milk, time to leave your pity party, etc.. I think if I needed to still learn something from my past and it looked to others as if I were wallowing in pity, I think that can only be their judgment. Knowing what it takes for another to experience or learn from something is a most singular event. That’s not to say one can’t get stuck places too long, but then the stuckness can also be a needed lesson.
I think valuable is the best word to use about regrets, as you’ve pointed out. Use them to find what seems right for the next time. Employing the just-get-over-it stance, to me, is simply denial at work. And is very uncaring and disrespectful to what one may have had to live through.
By the way, it took me a long time before I came to these opinions/understandings and there is definite regret I didn’t know them before now.
I knew from the title this article was sure to have my name written all over it. Fruitful use of all tools, even if, and especially when, they don’t look anything like a tool.
Barbara
Thanks Barbara, I hadn’t made the connection of just-get-over-it and denial, but I think you’re right. And I hadn’t thought of no regrets leading us to do the same things over either, once again you’re on the money I think. Many thanks for your comment.
Hi, Evan -
This is a very helpful post. It’s a topic that touches on something that I’m not quite able to get hold of. I’ve spent a lot of time recalling and regretting so many things I did when depressed and acting very strangely – and at times destructively. A lot of that is the sort of obsessive thinking about everything I’ve done wrong that is a recurrent symptom of depression for me. I’ve gotten to the point where I can quickly shut off that self-torture by reminding myself not only that it’s long past and can’t be changed but also that it resulted from illness. I regret that I couldn’t have acted differently in that state because I know what I would have done if I’d not been depressed.
Sometimes, what I call regret about the past is really grief about what I lost through a life long dominated by severe depression. Perhaps that’s what resonates about your post. The word regret has many evocative associations – I need to mull them over some more.
Thanks for a great post.
John
Hi John, I’m glad it was helpful. Let me know about the mulling you do. Thanks for your comment.
My approach to the question of whether or not I have regreats has always been this: I am happy with who I am today, which means that I should be thankful for everything that I have been through. Obviously, life’s big decisions sculpt our character and morale, but it’s also the small decisions in life that we make many times throughout the day. So, am I happy with the person I am? Absolutely. However, there have been some points in my life where the answer was not that easy. I guess you could say that I was regrettying some decisions. At that point, I made changes to my life to make things better. Now, when I think about converstaions or actions that I should not have been a part of, I know that I have learned from them and we are back to square one… They have helped to create the person typing this very response, and that is a person I am proud to be.
Hi Brooke, thanks for your comment. I think the point you make about the small decisions shaping us as well as the big ones is quite important. Thanks for your contribution.