REGRETS

Usually I think our regrets are because we believe we could have done something else. We want to go back and re-do what we did — to voice our anger differently, to assert our need more strongly, to leave a relationship sooner or stay longer. On occasion something like this may be possible. Our regret may motivate us to learn to voice our anger differently or to re-establish a relationship. We can’t re-do the past, but we may be able to behave differently in the present, including in relationships that have continued into the present from our past.

Sometimes, I think, we regret something even though we recognise we couldn’t have done anything else. I find this much harder to know what to do with. Common advice is to realise that we can’t change the past, to realise that what’s done is done and so forth. These are truisms.
They are truisms that I feel uncomfortable with. I feel that an absolute ‘no regrets’ policy lies perilously close to callousness. So I’d like to examine regret a little.
For me regret involves a comparison, a comparison between what I did or didn’t do with what I could have done or not done. The comparison can be a moral one (what I did or didn’t do compared with what I should have done or not done), but this needn’t be the case: I may regret that I didn’t get the job or that the meeting took longer than it could have, and no moral dimension is involved.

 Desire
Regret is bound up with the desire for a situation, or my response to it, to be different to how it was. If nothing else, regret alerts us to a desire that we have. This may be information that is worth having. We may find that we want to live more harmoniously with others, or assert our difference more firmly, or want meetings to run more efficiently.


If we listen to our regrets then we may learn about our desires and values. We can’t change the past, but our regrets may give us information about the direction that we want to head in the future. It may be futile to try to change the past, but if we listen to our regrets we may learn more about who we are.
Do you have regrets? Have you learned from them? Or, have you found that dwelling on them is just a waste of time? I’d like to hear your experience in the comments. Joel  JP Pile