Book of Regrets

by EMMANUEL R. FERNANDEZ

 

     One Saturday afternoon, during my diplomatic posting in Jordan, I decided to while away the sweltering summer hours in the English language section of a bookstore inside a mall near our neighborhood.  There, I stumbled upon a little book whose title immediately caught my attention – The Book of Regrets:  Thoughts, Memories and Revelations from a Celebrated Cast  by Juliet Solomon.  It was a compilation of the regrets of a number of famous people that included writers, politicians, captains of industry, sports and showbiz celebrities.  Their regrets were varied and immensely interesting.  I finished browsing over the book with the comforting realization that even people you least expect to have regrets do have their own regrets.

     The truth is, most of us keep, inside some secret vault in our hearts, our own little “book of regrets.”   In our moments of solitude, we struggle to overcome some regrets, or try our best to live with them at least.  Allow me to share with you some lessons I have learned over the years about dealing with regrets.

     I learned that the first thing to do when dealing with regrets is to determine exactly what kind of regret is it that we are dealing with.  Is it a regret about something we have done, or is it a regret about something we have failed to do?  If it is about the latter, then we would do well to remember that it is never too late to try doing it at last.  We have all heard about senior citizens who decided to go back to school in their retirement years to pursue the course that they really wanted to take when they were young, but which they had to forego for one reason or another.  We have also heard about mid-career executives who opted to quit their high-paying jobs in order to indulge in full their true passions for music, for writing, or for the fine arts. If they could do it, so can each of us -- if we are courageous enough to lose sight of the shore in order to discover new oceans (to paraphrase what the French writer Andre Gide once said).

     If the regret we are dealing with is about something we have done in the past, then we must ask ourselves if there is still something we can do about it.  Chances are, there is no longer anything we can do at this point to “undo” it.  All we can do is to find a way to repair the damage it has done to us and to other people, ask for the latter’s forgiveness, make amends, and help them (and ourselves) move on.

     Second, for both kinds of regret, it would help us if we called to mind that our decision to do or not to do something in the past (which is now the cause of our regret) was actually “the best decision” we could make at that time.  From the standpoint of the present, our past decision now appears unwise, irresponsible and wrong.  But we must remember that our past decision did not appear to us that way at the time we made it.  On the contrary, we probably had all the reasons to believe at that time that it was the best thing to do, and that it was right for us to do it.  Maybe other people believed otherwise.  But we still went ahead with the decision because our personal paradigm at that time had convinced us that, all things considered, it was indeed the best thing for us to do.  Given the same set of circumstances, we would probably be making the very same decision that we made then.  It would, therefore, be unfair for us to condemn and ceaselessly punish the young man we once were for something he honestly believed was the best thing for him to do at that time.

     Third, we could cushion the impact of our regret if we helped ourselves realize that, in fact, we could have done worse things than the ones we now regret having done. Human nature being what it is, there is literally no limit to the bad decisions we could have made in our past life.  If we regret the fact that we got married too young, long before we were ready for the responsibilities of having a wife and children, let us remember that we could have done worse things than that.  We could have become irredeemably hooked on a vice when we were young, or we could have done something that really ruined our young lives beyond repair.  That we did not go that far is reason enough to be grateful, and to be kinder to ourselves when making an assessment of our past lives.

     Finally, we must learn how to extract the gold inside the ore of our past mistakes.  The things we did or did not do in the past, which we now regret, must have inadvertently affected someone’s life (including our own) in a positive way. Even the pain that resulted from our mistakes has probably made us better persons, in ways we have neither intended nor have hitherto been aware of.  Our actions can have (to borrow a term popularized by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton) “unanticipated consequences.”   Even negative actions can have unintended positive consequences.  More importantly, we must remind ourselves that ours is a God who can write straight with crooked lines.  He can help us turn our past mistakes into stepping stones to a   better life. We just have to be open and attentive to His silent promptings.  In fact, He has probably done exactly that many times in the past without our knowing it.  He has woven our mistakes into the fabric of our life in such a way that instead of ruining it, they have made it even more sturdy and more beautiful to behold.

     Several years ago, young lovers in Rome had a very interesting way of sealing their love for each other.  They would go to an old bridge in the city called Ponte Milvio bringing with them a lock with their names written on it.  They would then attach the lock to one of the lampposts of the bridge and throw away the key into the Tiber River underneath. It was their way of saying that the love they had sealed would never be unlocked, because they had both made a decision to let go of the key for all eternity. The practice became so popular that the lampposts eventually collapsed on account of the weight of the locks (which were fondly called lucchetti d’amore or “locks of love” by the locals).  After I left Rome for good in 2009, I heard that the city government eventually penalized the practice because of the danger it posed to the old bridge.  But I also heard that young Italians, being the hopeless romantics that they are, still continue to do it despite the ban.

     We can adopt the same practice when dealing with our regrets.  After exhausting all the possible ways of overcoming them, or at least of coming to terms with them, we can make a conscious decision to lock them out of our minds and throw away the key for good.  After all, there is indeed no use crying over spilled milk. No amount of wishing that we could turn back the hands of time and redo things the right way can bring the past back.  At some point, we need to achieve closure from whatever we did yesterday, forgive ourselves and move on. Of course, even after having made such a decision, some of our regrets can still find a way to come back and haunt us.  For even lovers who have thrown away the key to their locks of love into the Tiber River can still be visited afterwards by doubts about their love.  But lovers who remind each other of the lock they have closed and the key they have thrown away eventually manage to triumph over their doubts.  So too shall we triumph over our lingering regrets if we remind ourselves of the lock we have closed and the key we have decided to hurl away into the flowing river beyond our minds.