regret

Let's face it; life is hard. I mean, it can be at times. No one handed me an instruction manual on how to live a good, decent life; to make the right decisions for myself and for those around me; to handle mistakes with dignity and poise and to use those mistakes to make better decisions in the future; and how to live every day with the satisfaction of having made the right choices, or without being punished by making the wrong ones. No, life doesn't come with a technical manual, because either said manual would be so large as to be unreadable by anyone within a lifetime, or absolutely unuseable because what works for one person under one set of circumstances does not, or can not, work for another. Instead, we have to write the manual for our own lives. We have to learn what we love and what we hate; we have to make decisions, most of them on the spot, with little information or foresight into the possible outcomes; and we have to live with those decisions. We have to make a life all on our own.

Typically, I don't bother myself much with regret. At least, not any more, and to say that means I don't spend my time reviewing my past, discovering what I did wrong and agonizing over what I did to make my life so terrible. There was a time when I was locked into a little black cube of self-inflicted punishment, its sides built of walls of anger, fear, doubt, regret, worry and shame. That's six sides of a cube if you missed that. Inside this little cube the inexhaustable, meticulous scrutinizing of every decision I had ever made and the proper "punishment" for the bad choices and presumed wrong-doings, as well as the associated malaise and regret of the lonely, sad life I had chosen for myself were constant companions. 

Yea, that was fun. But that was what my manual said was the correct way of handling things. I had to rewrite it, and revisions were aplenty, the most important of these being to simply let go. Bad decisions or good, wrong or right, correct or incorrect, the past has to remain in the past. Yes, the past should inform the present, yes, transgressions made should be amended and successes should be remembered and the pain or joy should be properly felt, but yesterday was yesterday and today will only be the same as yesterday if you choose make it so. I had to forgive myself for what I thought was bad or wrong in the past and applaud myself for what I thought was good or right (I use the word tense 'had' when I should use 'have', because it's a constant). I had to realize the choices I made at any one point in time were made with the best information available and using the best decision-making tools I had at that time. To say either of those were incomplete would be an understatement, but that's the best anyone can expect out of themselves or the situations in which we find ourselves. We are imperfect beings, in an imperfect world, and will always lack the information required to make perfect choices. To punish myself with regret over a decision I made yesterday using whatever I had then to the best of the ability I had then is a waste of today, so long as I gave it a genuine effort and was honest to myself. 

But, like I said, life is hard; regret is a side-effect (or maybe it's a symptom) of having consciousness, and a conscience. So long as the possibilities in life are nearly infinite, the human mind will seek to learn of them especially when new data concerning them is uncovered, which is the obvious and inevitable after-effect of having made a decision. Regret, for me, has to be fought; the mistakes let go, the victories celebrated, the lessons learned, the manual revised, constantly and vigilantly, and the pain of the loss or the happiness of the victory felt, actually felt. Quite frankly, we are the culmination of the decisions and their outcomes. We are the result of them, we are made by them; and while there may be parts of me I don't particularly care for at times and parts I like at others, there isn't much about me, or my past, that I would change if I could, nor is there any evidence that I would like, or dislike, the person I would be otherwise if I had the opportunity to do so.