Where I'm Coming From

Out beyond ideas of

wrong-doing & right-doing

there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language,

even the phrase 'each other'

doesn't make any sense.

--Rumi

Regretting Chocolate Cheesecake

They say that the only thing better than owning a boat is not owning a boat.

Not a great metaphor, but allow me to suggest that regret is like a boat in the sense that it’s sooooo much better not to have it.

Regret is a dark, nasty, painful feeling—an ache without a remedy. It’s our conscience beating us up about something we did badly—hurt someone, betrayed them, shortchanged them—or did it to ourselves.

I still regret eating the chocolate cheesecake I made for Bernice's birthday party.

I regret lots of things. Damage was done. Mistakes were made—and unlike Richard Nixon, I know they were my fault.

But it’s over. There is nothing to be done but make amends and move on. And in my case never eat cheesecake again.

My foresightful daughter, who is still a bit early in the life cycle, with minimal luggage and a keen sense of the adventures awaiting her, points out that we also feel regret over things we didn’t do. Like the workaholic who regrets on his deathbed that he didn’t spend more time with his family. Or, like, damn it, I really wish I had spent more time in France and Italy before I got sober.

Whether it’s for things we’ve done or wish we had done, our own regret is always retrospective.

But like a boat, we like it when someone else has regret. In My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins has that wonderful, vengeful lament when it looks like Eliza is going to marry Freddy:

Marry Freddy.
What an infantile idea.

What a heartless, wicked,
brainless thing to do.

But she'll regret it.
She'll regret it!

It's doomed before
they even take the vow.

As far as I can tell, the only useful thing about regret is when we can use the memory of past mistakes as a guide, like landing lights on an airstrip, to help us figure out how to navigate the future. That’s conscience. Otherwise it’s masochism, the indulgent pressing of a bruise for no good reason.

In fact, it’s damaging. Neuroscientists know that repeated patterns of negative thought create pathways in the brain where those negative thoughts get stronger and more destructive. Regret wastes our time. It saps our strength, and gets in the way of appreciating what we have.

I checked with the Sufi poet Rumi, to see what he had to say about regret. He says, Don't regret what's happened. If it's in the past, let it go. Don't even remember it.

He says,

listen, o drop,
give yourself up without regret,
and in exchange gain the OCEAN.

A friend of mine, when his mother was dying, asked her if there was anything she would have done differently. Truth be told, my friend was hoping she’d say she was sorry she hadn’t treated her children with more kindness.

But no, she said she wouldn’t have done anything differently. Which was kind of shocking at first in its self satisfaction, but she went on to say that had she done anything differently, she wouldn’t have ended up right where she was, having lived a full, satisfying life in the company of her beloved husband.

They had a great life, and a boat.