Regrets

In my line of work, I hear a lot of people talking about their regrets.  The marriage they regret.  The divorce they regret.  The marriage that didn't happen that they regret....  So I recently got to thinking about what I regret.  I mean, really regret, not just times I think I probably should have done something differently.  And you know what?  I can only think of a couple of small instances and those are all about how I treated someone badly when I was in a bad mood.

Although some might argue that I should, I don't regret any of my past relationships.  Even the worst ones gave me some amount of pleasure (and gave me an excuse to avoid the dating pool for a bit - always a plus!)  From some, I learned about life; from others, I learned about myself; from all, I learned about tolerance.

There are paths I might have chosen that would have been positive ones and sometimes I went another way because of fear or apathy or because I didn't know better.  But if I turned away because of fear, or any other reason, that's where I was at that point.  It's perhaps unrealistic to think I could have chosen differently, and impossible to know for sure that I should have.

The larger point, of course, is that focusing on regrets is always useless - unless it is a means to learn a better way to do something in the future - and then it becomes a focus on learning and improving, rather than regretting.  After I (finally) ended a drama-filled relationship of five years a couple of decades ago, my father said to me how sad it was that I had "wasted the best years of [my] life" on that relationship.  I gather I was meant to regret investing so much time on a man who actually was rather a waste of air, but all I could think was, "Really??  Those were the best years of my life??  So what about the decades that lie ahead?  It is time to go bungee-jumping without the cord?"

Have I ever dated another man with that particular set of flaws?  No.  Have I had other drama-filled relationships?  Yep, and one of those remains the best relationship I ever had.  (Granted, my criteria for "best relationship" may not be the same as that used by 99% of the population.)

Nonetheless, I think the important thing to do is to try to live so as to avoid regrets.  Possible?  LOL!  Of course not, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.  I also think we tend to regret the things we didn't do far more than we regret the things we do.  So here are some things I'll never regret missing - because I haven't missed them:

sky diving
riding a mechanical bull
singing karaoke in a crowded bar
moving across the country with two suitcases, no job, no apartment and no friends
taking trapeze lessons
dancing on a bar
changing careers ... several times

I'd love to see others' lists of the things they've made sure they'll never regret missing.  I might even steal from them to add to my own.