Not so regretfully yours
What have I regretted doing or not doing you may ask while we sit sipping in the late Spring sunshine?
My immediate answer is that I don’t have any regrets. All of the false starts and wrong turns got me to where I am now. And today, I feel good! Sing it James Brown! Mum’s tagline for every perceived rejection was that everything turns out for the best, echoing the standard response of a robed Zen master to the ailing and wailing who came for advice...’Got cancer?..Great!’... ‘Bankrupt?.. Excellent!’ In the long run, time and our resilience would prove them right.
But, walk by my side, shoulder to shoulder. Eyes ahead. Ask me again. Of course I have regrets. And they are my allies. So long as I call them by their name. It was Dan Pink whose TED talk alerted me to the idea that when I turn my regrets inside out, I get a picture of what is actually important to me. My regret over something I have done, or more likely not done, as in a squandered opportunity, reveals a watermark of values that I might have lost sight of.
There are easy ones from long ago like one-night-stands. Always regretted them, regretted that submission to my lust, waking up depleted, the empty glare of the morning after. What of the watermark? Well clearly my desire is a clueless and beautiful beast that needs me to be it’s mahout. Secondly, love is a key ingredient for gratifying intimacy. Lessons from experience that the kids will have to learn for themselves. Regret here is a reliable teacher. So I will leave it to her.
What’s another easy one? I regret gambling on the stock market. In my mind it was never gambling. I had taken very pricey expert training and listened to the advice of many a showman. And I lost my pants. My shirt too. I believed that I was both smart and psychic and that the market would submit to my wishes. Straight gambling. Always just one more shot because it has got to turn around. Familiar to you too?
So what is the watermark of that regret? God is not personal and nor are the markets. The future is guesswork. The more confident a fortune teller, the further you run. Gambling is exciting. Pay and play and leave.
Your inventory of regrets they may sound something like mine. I am sure we all share a few.
I regret not doing the work to create the security I want in old age. I have moral regrets like not doing the right thing when rounding up my work hours. I have connection regrets like not reaching out to my exchange student mother until it was too late to let her know how much I admired her.
And they all translate into a value system of sorts. Yes, security is important to me, yes, I want to do the right thing, yes, I want to love and be loved, enmeshed in a community of plants, animals and people.
Most of my mild regrets are not regrets of the timid. They are of some bold action taken, perhaps not very skillfully, that threw me for a loop. Those actions I usually re-frame because they brought me here. And as you may know, I like it here. A lot. What stings more however, are the regrets of inaction. Of staying glued to the wall as the music rocks the joint , rather than dance my beautiful and awkward dance. Of over-thinking, over-consulting, pleasing, procrastination, and poof, a decade flies by.
So as we walk deeper into the woods, you and I, I will tell you that during my teen years I was set on becoming a game warden and teacher, someone who protects wild places, wildlife, and inspires others to do the same. The game reserves in South Africa were my Eden. But the community that grew me had other ideas, and South Africa was in turmoil, and I was dissuaded. Fact is, I chose not to follow my heart.
Finding the watermark hidden in a regret of missed opportunity is of course pure speculation. Could of, should of, would of…And yet, when I look at some of the bolder choices I have made over the years, like leaving Israel, settling for a decade of filming in East Africa or buying a farm here in the Northwest, I wonder if that passionate teen, who believed the umbrella acacia and the myriad of beings she shelters were reason enough to live, perhaps what drove him has been at the helm of this ship all along.
