Instead of running from regret, embrace it as the revelatory tool it is

“Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.”

Henry David Thoreau

One of the earliest regrets I remember is at my great grandmother’s funeral. I realized I would never see her again, never talk to her again, never visit her cute apartment and drown in all the wonderful baked goods she loved to make — I realized this, and regretted spending so little time with her, and regretted more how much I took her for granted.

Regret hurts, plain and simple.

How often do people tell you they want to live a life without regrets? How often do you tell that to yourself? It’s part of the one of the most important questions we must answer intentionally or by default: how will we live?

“Live your life with no regrets,” the motivational poster says.

“I have no regrets,” says the random celebrity.

What does that actually mean? Is that even possible? Here’s the Devil’s advocate: should we live without regret? Would that be a good thing?

I was confronted with this question while reading a timeless Japanese classic by Genzaburo Yoshino, How Do You Live? A story about growing up and living in a imperfect world with an imperfect self.

Most everyone you meet lives with regrets. Regret is that deep pain when we violate our own hearts. When we look back and wonder, why didn’t I do what was in my heart? Or, why did I do that terrible thing? Deeds or omissions. The done or the undone. Said or unsaid.

Regrets riddle each human life like autumn leaves on a cobblestone path. I have many of my own. Far too many to count.

Living without regret implies that you will do the things you fear to do, not let anyone hold you back, and overall live a life that reduces the chances that you’ll regret it later. That’s all well and good, but does not mean you will live without regret — only that you’ll repeat fewer of them.

Is regret a thing we should avoid? Something we can live better without? How can we grapple with its pain when it arises? Let’s dig into the matter.

When we are little, little regrets blossom. When we are older, they get bigger and bigger, as life gets bigger and bigger, the stakes higher, and our own awareness more salient. Unlike all the other creatures in the world, we have the ability to look upon our lives and feel a pain that has no physical wound, yet a wound far deeper than any blade can cut.

“Human beings are so great that they demonstrate their greatness by recognizing their own misery. A tree does not recognize that it is miserable… Thus human misery proves the greatness of all human beings. It is the misery of a king who has lost his throne.” — Blaise Pascal

Yes, regret can be a form of misery.

Our bodies can be hurt or starved. Our dreams can be shattered. Others can sting us with words or deeds or rejection. Yet which misery is greater than all of them? The one that is self-inflicted. The awareness we have done something wretched that we cannot change. To look back and think, “What have I done?”

Here’s one reason why we should embrace regret: regret tells us that we care, and if we dig deep, shows us what we care deeply about.

It is painful to admit mistakes. Regret is a bloodless bleeding of the soul. No wonder people say they want to live without regret. No wonder that has become popular to say. A fad. A lie. It’s nonsense, because regrets serve an indispensable purpose in our lives. They are the voice of our conscience, and unless you’re a saint, your conscience has a lot to say no matter how good you think you are.

All right, so you did something wrong. Thinking about what you did will never change it, but regret keeps reminding you of it. Why? For in all its pain, it can help us learn something important about being human.

As long as we are human, we make mistakes. And when we make mistakes, our conscience tells us. We regret because we have in us that gift of knowing right from wrong, knowing the true voice of our hearts. It’s because we have the ability to live good lives that we are able to feel this pain at all, and this pain educates us, cut by cut, to live a better life — because while each of us wants to be good, we all know the many times we have been evil.

What would life be if we never had regrets? If we never had that pain to tell us when our hearts have been broken? Because no one can live a perfect life in which he or she does no wrong, makes no mistakes, does everything perfectly — it is impossible! So to say you want to live literally without regrets is to say you want to make no mistakes, no wrongdoings, no shortfalls, to do right and never wound your heart or your dreams.

That’s not what life is made of.

Life is storms and trials and darkness as much as it is brightness and ease and meadows. Life is, and always has been, like the Yin and Yang, dark and light, good and evil, pleasure and pain, holiness and sin, right and wrong — and in the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, that line of good and evil cuts through every human heart.

We can’t live without regret, for we are not capable of living perfect lives. The only other side of that coin is to feel no regret despite doing wrong things, and people like that have a title: psychopaths.

We have to accept that we will have regrets. The ones in the past, and the ones that will arise in the future.

What do we do about that?

We use them to live better. If that thing you did bothers you so much and won’t get out from under your skin, why not do something about it? Why not retool yourself so that you don’t repeat that particular mistake? It won’t save you from making other ones, but it will inoculate you from driving that nail deeper into your conscience.

When you use your regrets to learn and grow, you get closer to your truest self. In the words of Geothe:

“Error has the same relationship to truth as sleeping does to waking. I have seen that when one wakes from error, one turns to truth again as if revived.”

Regret awakens us from error. Regret guides us towards the truths in our own hearts. Live without regret? Live without truth?

Truth is rarely easy. It’s painful. But just as no muscle grows without effort, so too are good lives crafted not on perfection and idealistic fads, but through the blood and tears of mistakes, through the inseparable voice in our hearts, through all of life’s trials. Learning to live is painful, but to have never learned to live is something far, far worse.

Living without regrets may amount to simply running from yourself — and you can never outrun who you are, no more than you can outrun your own shadow. Instead, be brave enough to face regrets, to feel them when they arise, and to take responsibility for the errors they are telling you about.

Do not waste the opportunity that this pain is giving you: the opportunity to grow, to be a little wiser, a little better. A life well lived has its share of regrets. But so, too, does it have its share of lessons learned. The difference is whether those regrets eat at us like maggots, or serve as something constructive. Are your regrets just regrets, or are they lessons?

Here’s what I tried doing at the end of the day: I stopped and asked myself, what did I regret from that day? I got a deluge of answers in an instant.

I realized I regretted sleeping in too late and not having those hours.

I regretted not helping in the yard, with all the autumn leaves coming down and needing raking.

I regretted not going for a walk in the evening, when the dusk was calm and beautiful.

I regretted being unkind to myself.

I regretted many other things, too.

I chose to act on many of these the next day, and you know what? It was way better. You could say that I chose to live that day “without regrets,” but that’s not true, because there are always more. What I did, in truth, was live with my regrets, learn from my regrets, and live on with the resolution to pay attention to that voice of regret in my heart. That is far more valuable and far more achievable.

So instead of saying that you’ll live without regrets, perhaps it’s better to say you’ll learn from each one that arises, and be better— imperfectly better, but better nonetheless.


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