Recently, a talk with a friend of mine that I haven’t seen for quite a while (her living now in a far-away country) had the most unexpected effect on me. She was telling me about a close call she went through recently and, weird or not, I started to question my own life, looking back at all I have done thus far, what memories and experiences I have “collected”, what joys I have felt, what sorrows or losses I went through…
She was sharing with me all that she was proud of her successes and also felt a bit down remembering the things that did not go as intended and I questioned her “why”. “Why do you experience such different states of mind when you look at both your highs and lows of your life so far? They both built you, the two types of experiences have brought something into your life, they both taught you valuable lessons, so why regret one side of the story?” A long set of minutes in complete silence followed and she practically started to share a whole bunch of other aspects of those “unfortunate” events to express the whole spectrum of feelings she had about them and why she blamed herself for acting the way she did.
Going from one thing to another, at a certain point in our discussion, I told her something that stirred things up for her: “Life is too damn short to waste it on regrets when we actually took those decisions based on what we knew at that given point in time and those experiences showed us a different side of the story. There is no point in regretting something that is part of us. What we can do is do our best to understand those things better and learn from them. Time is so very precious to waste it on wandering why the past is what it is when we cannot change it.”
Wasting valuable time with regrets, that is everything you want, but productive thinking.
Nothing good can come out of such approach. It can only fill you up with negative energy and pull your drive down.
It is never too late to have a different grasp on things, as it is never too late to try something new when we feel the need to change.
That is what being human is all about…
We are all perfectible, we are all a major ongoing continuous improvement project. Taking it all one step at a time enables quick wins and progress even when we are not really actively pushing for change.