By Yin Nwe Ko

 

“Sometimes the wrong choices bring us to the right places.” Unknown source.

 

Six weeks ago, the doctors told me he had six weeks to live. I do not think he is going to survive the night.

 

“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?” I whimpered, my voice barely above a whisper. “We don’t have any time left. I didn’t think that as a 19-year-old, seeing my father die in a hospital was going to be something I would experi­ence. Wasn’t he meant to grow old and grey, with me taking care of him?”

 

Nevertheless, in the early hours of the following morning, when the rest of the world was lying in a quiet slumber, I was sitting at my dad’s bedside, hold­ing his hand while it slowly grew cold. I wasn’t willing to let go, as letting go would mean accepting what was. I was not ready for that.

 

My dad and I had always had such a difficult relationship. I was the rebellious teenager and he was the frustrated father who just never knew what to do with me. In the end, when cancer had really taken over, he just gave up. He knew I wouldn’t be his problem for much longer. As the weeks and months passed, it became easier to be without him. But the one thing that followed me was the regret I felt — of not trying to understand him, and not making our relationship better. The older I get, the more I realize that that period of life was meant to teach me some tough lessons — les­sons that have stayed with me to this day.

 

A couple of years after I lost my dad. I was in the changing room of the gym when I got talk­ing to a woman I had never seen there before. She asked me how I was, and I decided to be com­pletely honest with her. I told her I was feeling weighed down with regret. I had had a tumultuous relationship with my dad and I had not made the time to rectify it before he died. There were so many things I wanted to say, apol­ogize for, and understand about him. There was so much I should have said but had not.

 

She told me that I could still do that. The mind is a powerful thing, influenced by fabrications, as well as real events. She told me to find someone I trusted, and talk to them like they were my dad. Be brutally honest. Say everything. It took me another year of thinking about it before finally having that conversation. It was the most liberating thing I have ever done. What regrets have you experienced, and what have you learned from them?

 

Regrets, I’ve again had a few.

 

 

But then again, too few to mention, Frank Sina¬tra crooned in his 1969 hit ‘My Way! The song’s idea is seductive: anyone can just declare that what’s done is done and move on. Some take the dec­laration a step further and claim they have no regrets. Whether an aspiration or an actual philosophy, ‘no regrets’ suggests that life can and should be lived without look­ing through the rearview mirror.

 

Easier said than done, though. In 2020, author Daniel H. Pink launched the World Regret Survey, the largest survey on the topic ever undertaken. More than 15,000 people in 105 countries were asked: “How often do you look back on your life and wish you had done things differently?”

 

Eighty-two per cent said re­gret is at least an occasional part of their life; roughly 21 per cent said they feel regret ‘all the time’. Only one per cent said they never feel regret.

 

If you are in the ‘no regrets’ school of life, you might think that all this regret is a recipe for unhappiness. But that isn’t the case. True, letting yourself be overwhelmed by regret is indeed bad for you. But going to the other extreme may be even worse. Ex­tinguishing your regrets does not free you from shame or sorrow; it consigns you to make the same mistakes again and again. To tru­ly get over our guilt requires that we put regret in its proper place.

 

As uncomfortable as it is, re­gret is an amazing cognitive feat. It requires that you go back to a past scenario, imagine that you acted differently, and with that new scenario in mind, arrive at a different present - and then, compare that fictional present with the one you are experiencing in reality. For example, if your relationship with your partner has soured, your regret might mentally take you back to last year. You would remember your pettiness and irritability, and then imagine yourself being kind in­stead of hurtful at key moments. Then you would fast-forward to today and see how your relation­ship could be flourishing instead of languishing.

 

Not all regrets are the same. Pink says they come in four ba­sic varieties, and an instance of regret may involve just one or a combination. Wishing you have been kinder to your partner is an example of a connection regret, in which you lament behaviour that harmed an important rela­tionship, such as neglecting your bond with relatives before they died.

 

Many connections and re­grets overlap with moral regrets, which can come about after you violate your values. For example, you may pride yourself on being a loving person, and thus regret not living up to this image in the relationship you harmed. Moral regrets can also involve just your­self. Maybe you regret not living up to your commitment to your health when you skipped the gym.

 

The other two categories of regrets involve life choices. Foun­dation regrets are those in which you did something that affected the course of your life in a way you do not like. A classic exam­ple is wishing you had studied further. Meanwhile, boldness and regrets are the opposite: they are all about inaction and forgone op­portunities. You feel this when you kick yourself for not taking a chance, as in wishing you had just gone up to that attractive person and introduced yourself.

 

Unanalyzed and unmanaged, any variety of regret can be poi­son for your well-being. Regret is implicated in depression and anxiety, and excessive regret can adversely affect your hormones and immune system. For me, it is anathema to sleep. I am not alone in this: in 2013, researchers asked one group of participants in an experiment to describe ‘your most burdensome regret’ right before going to bed; this group took 61 per cent longer to get to sleep than a group told to think about a typical day.

 

But regret doesn’t have to be left unmanaged. The trick is not to banish the bad feeling; it is to acknowledge it and use it for im­provement. Instead of letting the spectre of your failed relationship make you miserable, you can be honest with yourself about what went wrong and use that knowl­edge in the future.

 

The benefits of regret do not come to us by chance. We have to seek them out on purpose to improve ourselves.

 

Here are three steps you can take the next time you find yourself contemplating your past missteps.

 

People often say their regrets ‘haunt’ them. This suggests that regret is like a ghost: not entirely clear but always intimidating. Bring your ghost out of the shadows by making a list of your regrets. Write down why each one still bothers you and its lingering bad effects. Be honest with­out catastrophizing.

 

For ex­ample, note that you hurt a friend’s feelings through your fault, but also that this almost certainly didn’t ruin the per­son’s life. You will find that a list is a lot less frightening than a ghost.

 

After you make a mistake, life moves on. But some­times you just can’t stop kicking yourself. Perhaps you dropped out of school dec­ades ago and are constantly calculating today how much money you would be mak­ing had you completed your studies. In other words, you have voluntarily chosen a life sentence for a poor decision you made in the past. Now is the time to appeal that ver­dict. May¬ be you’d be mak­ing more today, but adding self-loathing to the financial penalty makes no sense. Re­solve to commute your emo­tional sentence with a simple verbal declaration: “I make amends with myself and will not waste another minute of my life reliving a decision that cannot be changed.”

 

If you never experienced re­gret, you would keep repeat­ing the same behaviours that led you to miss opportunities and wreck relationships in the past. Your regret can teach you to become smart­er and more successful if you let it. In your list of regrets, also note how you want to change your behaviour and outline your future resolu­tions. Next, list the ways that you can invest in your skills right now - and get started. Regrets may hurt, but ob­sessing over them is destruc­tive. Shunning them (or try­ing to live without them) is a lost opportunity to grow. Life is a journey full of pleasure and pain. To live it well and fully and to move for¬ the ward, means learning from every bit of it, including the mistakes.

 

 

Reference: https://tinybud­dha.com/blog/