What are regrets like?
Sometimes I think about regrets….more than I’d like to admit. I find it to be such a complex concept to regret something..
It’s funny how regrets can be so small and so large simultaneously. But no one’s laughing, are they?
Because regrets, no matter how small or big, never turn into those instances where you can laugh about them in retrospect.
The word regret means wishing something would have never happened, wishing you’d made better choices, wishing change would have just hit pause for a bit.
When I think of my regrets, I feel as though there’s a variety of them. Some haunt me day in and day out, while some come and go like an unwanted thought that you just discard.
The regrets that haunt you are the scary ones. They seem to never leave your side, do they?
It’s as though however lonely you are, these regrets are always there to keep you company. And somewhere…somewhere you know that they only make unwanted company, but it’s hard to let go of them for some reason.
I wouldn’t believe anyone who states they have no regrets, because try as they might there’s no exception for human tendencies.
Everyone has regrets...
Regret is a word which refers to the past. Often while ruminating over the past we forget to acknowledge the fact that however much you dwell on regrets, you can never undo them.
It’s the sad truth that you can’t change the past and while it may seem like stating the obvious, it really isn’t that obvious to people off late.
Having regrets is perfectly normal, and of course, the reason you may regret something is because of the consequence that it led to, and how you found it unpleasant. A regret can be as small as “I forgot my keys today, and I had to wait outside the house for an hour” to as powerful as “I kept unwanted friendships and thus constantly felt disappointed”. Nonetheless, all of these classify as regrets, the only difference being the first one you won’t remember for more than a year and the second may affect your future in certain aspects.
What we shouldn’t lose track of to avoid getting swallowed by our regrets is the present. The present is the only thing that is in your conscious control. Not even the near future, not even the next hour or day of your life can be altered by you consciously. It does make you feel quite powerless, but the truth is, you can’t change what has yet to happen. Similarly, subconsciously wanting to change the past, which is in fact to regret something, is not going to be productive either.
A fresh perspective
A perspective that I’d like to leave you with, something that I find myself using to define the lines between past and present is this;
If you are even slightly happy with your present, if there is even one thing about it that you wouldn’t change, it means that your past, and those detrimental moments which you regret weren’t all wasted. There was something in those occurrences which is applied and used to constitute your present. This goes to say,
“Fix all the mistakes you’ve ever made, and you’ll end up erasing yourself”
So to conclude,
I strongly state, that having regrets, big or small, doesn’t make you weaker. If at all I’d go further and say have regrets because there is great learning from what not to do that you can apply extremely productively. But what you shouldn’t do is make your regrets so large and painful for yourself that they begin to intrude on your present. Can a balance be struck? Can you have regrets but yet not want to alter the past?
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