“The point isn’t to live without any regrets,
the point is to not hate ourselves for having them.”
~Kathryn Schulz
Looking back at my now five decades at Earth School, there are plenty of things I regret. Not wearing sunscreen. Crying through (and missing too much of) my first year of motherhood. Hating my body. Not saving more money. Over-plucking my eyebrows in the mid-aughts. Yelling at my daughter that she was impossible to parent. Ordering the salad when I wanted the carbonara. Acting like a bitch when I was a teenager (sorry Mom). Kissing that one guy. Not kissing that other guy. Giving up the violin. Not telling more people to kindly fuck off. Caring what the wrong people thought of me. Not signing up for the glass blowing class. Taking my husband for granted. Being quiet when I should have spoken up.
Regrets, I’ve had a few.
From the Old French word regreter, meaning to grieve for on remembering. If, as the Buddhists believe, grief is an inevitable part of being human, then regret is a painful but inescapable part of the package. And yet I see more and more people talking about living a life of no regrets. I wonder if they truly long for a lament-free existence. I suspect – I hope – they actually mean that they want to live in a way that isn’t fully controlled and defined by what they did or did not do.
Because to truly give up regret, we must also give up awareness. Regret only arises upon reflection, considering our past actions and how we wish we had made different choices.
Daniel Pink, the author of The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, says four types of regret exist.
Connection regret occurs when we treat someone we care about badly, like sixteen-year-old me telling my mom I hated her.
Moral regret is when we act in opposition to our deepest values, like hooking up with that one guy because I was drunk.
Foundational regret is making a choice that negatively affects our entire life path, like dropping out of school, getting arrested, or marrying the wrong person. Happy to report I don’t have any of these, though I did drive home drunk one night in college and shudder when I consider how many things could have gone terribly wrong.
Boldness regrets are those times we bewail the things that we didn’t do, out of fear. I didn’t go to see The Eagles because I didn’t want to drive to Chicago alone, then Glenn Frey died and so did my chance to see them perform live. Generally, in the short run, we are more likely to regret mistakes we made. But with the passing of time, we tend to regret inaction far more.
Regret plays an important evolutionary function. It is an evolutionary advantage for humans to learn from and recall past mistakes so as to avoid future related mistakes. Early Homo Sapiens have survived this long because our brains developed enough frontal lobe gray matter to process experiences in the moment and then reflect on them later on. When Grok ate the berries off a certain bush, he had terrible diarrhea. It was in Grok’s best interest to remember that bush and make different food choices in the future. Past experience lingers as a cautionary tale, paving the way for future better choices, hopefully taken with more awareness.
In this light, regret is a positive emotional experience. The problem arises when we get stuck in regret and can’t move forward. So forgive yourself already. For what you did. For the inaction. For all of it. Self-compassion is the other side of the regret coin. None of us are getting out of here without making a boatload of mistakes. Screwing up is baked in the life agreement. Learn from your miscalculations and move on with more insight.
Because sometimes the wrong choices bring us to the right places. Regret might cause distress in the moment, but it motivates us to become better people. True freedom is the awareness that you wished you had handled something differently, forgiving yourself, and then moving on with more wisdom.
