Regret - The tender trap of "if only"...

There is something very unsettling about regrets. With me, they have a score of almost zero on the mental, feel-good scale. A bin of despair, out of which we must occasionally haul ourselves, using the ropes of clever mantras and helpful sayings, like "Well if I hadn't have done that, I wouldn't be where I am now" - wordy platitudes, which while indisputably true, barely contain the comfort of a decent slice of chocolate cake.

Regrets are our mental, feel-bad reels. Wholesale trickery and hocus-pocus. The most curious definition of regrets I have heard all day, is the one that the clever people with couches use: They call regrets "counterfactual thinking" describing thus, the mind's habit of not only imagining, but building whole scenarios around - wait for it - alternative versions of things that never actually happened in the first place...

Oh.. the mind... that faithless pendulum, swinging between good sense and utter nonsense.

So firstly, I can observe that regrets don't seem to be born from indifference. They can't be. If we really didn't care about something, we wouldn't think to wish it were different. Regrets seem to come as a result of a deeper reflection that is rooted in a basic discontent with our present circumstances. With where we have ended up. If we find that we are struggling financially this month, we might regret a pricey purchase in our past. If the car breaks down, we might wish we had never bought it.

Regrets are there to tell us a story, and what the story seems to be telling us, is that there was once a perfect doorway through life and we somehow managed to walk right past it..

Regrets are the conversations we should have had. The call we never made. The relationship we stayed in for far too long - or maybe the one we left way too soon. That investment in Amazon, Apple or AirB&B, at which we turned our noses up. And perhaps the version of ourselves we quietly abandoned, in order to please other people.

“If only…”

Two tiny words that are capable of building entire double lives in the privacy of our minds.

And of course our minds are really good at producing something from nothing - not only regrets, but we are also very good at manufacturing worry, massive generalisations and wild leaps to wild conclusions. So good, in fact, that the people with the couches even have a name for it: "Cognitive Distortion" - or to you and me - twisted thinking.

So perhaps that is why regret feels so convincing — because the life-path we imagine after the fact is untouched by reality. The road not taken remains perfectly edited by our active imaginations. It seems like a lovely road... So smooth. So certain. So romantic.. Through the goggles of hindsight, we all become brilliant architects of totally fictional timelines.

We upright monkeys do this instinctively. We replay moments, rearrange choices, and quietly negotiate with versions of the past and infinite parallel universes, that are universally fictional. "Oh...if I had just done that instead of this, I would be so much happier..." It's pure mental cinema...

On the plus side, it is widely suggested that this ability can help us learn, reflect, and grow as people. OK, we will accept that. But we also need to be aware that regrets become more sinister when any of this good-natured regret-based reflection, quietly turns into systemic anguish. There is a bigly difference between visiting the past…and trying to live there.

I also seem to remember that we were always told to avoid regrets like strangers in white vans. We are often asked to reject them entirely. “Make sure you live with no regrets,” our Grandmothers would say, as though just having one or two little regrets would prove we were generally failing at life.

But perhaps (and this is a big maybe...) regret is not the enemy we were told it was. We have already accepted that without regret, there would be no reflection. So no moral compass either. No learning. No understanding that our choices have consequences that affect both ourselves and the people we love. Regret, in many ways, is evidence of consciousness. It reveals what mattered to us then, and what still matters. What shaped us. The problem, dear reader, is not regret itself.... Wait, what?

The problem begins when regret stops becoming a sounding board or a teacher… and starts becoming an identity. Because regret has a peculiar talent for re-writing our personal history. Our minds don't simply remember the past — they efficiently edit it. The story changes and softens on the edges of the road not taken, while magnifying the imperfections of the route we did end up choosing. Oooh... I see the pot hole... If we let regret take root, that means that the life we didn't live becomes desirable and polished and shiny. It becomes "Our Precious..."

We imagine there was a path, where that loveless, faithless marriage might never have led to such a painful divorce. A life where we didn't lose money on that house. A past where we did invest in Bitcoin. A yesterday where we did save that child from the frozen river and appear on the "Good Morning Show", changing the entire trajectory of our imagined lives...

In the rainy day of reason, if we actually look at the myriad, intricate pathways that we have all trod, the left turns and the right, it is easy to see that reality never, ever belonged to one single decision. Where we stand today is, of course the net product of all the little (at the time) decisions we have ever made.

We cannot avoid the wrong turns - at least "wrong" as regret would imply. We would still have done some incredibly dumb shit. Every path, in every single, infinite direction was going to imply some kind of loss. Every choice we made risked both tears and laughter. But they are only really visible in the rear-view mirror.

Yet regret, quietly whispers otherwise...

And that, my friends, is the tender trap of the “if only.” Not that we reflect... that kind of contemplation is ultimately human. But we do have an uncheckable tendency to slowly begin comparing our real lives to all those imagined, slightly "better-lived" ones. But when you think about it, those fanciful outcomes we covet, through the medium of regret, are totally impossible to compete with, because they never had to survive the actual reality of a deranged ex-wife, or the house that lost money. It seems to moi, that the flowery lands of possibility are only so absolutely seductive, simply because you can never actually experience them or even try and reach out and touch them.

Interestingly, psychologists have found (I googled it) that as people age, the nature of their regrets shifts. In the folly of youth, we tend to regret actions - mistakes, drunken choices and a bevy of things that seemed like a good idea at the time. But as we get older - and I have very recent, multiple experiences of this - it is all the stuff we didn't do - the inactions - that tend to weigh most heavy.

The house we didn't buy. The trip we never took. The friendship we just let lapse. The dog we didn't rescue. I still think about that dog.

So it's not so much our failures that haunt us, it is perhaps all those unlived lives. The nagging, haunting feeling that we could have done it better. And this, say the ones who know best, is because we the people, were not really designed with mental saftey in mind. Somewhere in the soup of our DNA, lies the ache for expansion. To reach, to try, to love and to risk everything for something that just effing changes us.

So my many personal regrets (because I am allowed to have a few) are not really about outcomes at all. They are about me abandoning myslef to either established convention or other to people's opinions. Those moments I knew something absolutely mattered, but I turned away anyway.

And here, lies the regret-flavoured magic.. here, regret offers something very shiny and valuable if we are willing to listen a wee bit. Because beneath regret lies a hidden truth about ourselves. The care we have for what we truly value. What we long for. What still matters. What still keeps us from freedom. What kind of life our deeper self may still be asking us to live. That is the stardust.

I believe that regrets don't ask us to punish ourselves for the past. They allow us to pay better attention. To notice where we failed our own, basic instincts. Where fear disguised itself as practicality or family norms. Where lies seemed better than the truth. Where we stopped believing we were allowed to start again.

So today, at least in my story, regrets are designated as bits of wisdom that lead us back towards real presence, and not backwards into the realms of self-berating and punishment. We march boldly forwards into awareness, folks.

There is also something profoundly human and comforting in just simply knowing that almost everyone carries regret, despite how carefully we hide it from one another. We often imagine ourselves alone in our self-questioning, believing everyone else moved through life with certainty, always getting it right, like my friend David Walker clearly seems to have done, while we somehow threw out the instructions, along with the cardboard box in which they came.

But beneath the surface, most of you who have been kind enough to read this far, are carrying some version of the same quiet achey-breaky feelings...

“I wish I had called one last time”... “I wish I had gone“..."I wish I hadn't”...

And my biggie?... "I wish I had believed in myself..."

So perhaps this is why spaces of honest conversation matter so deeply. Because the moment regret is spoken aloud, something shifts. Not because the past changes. But because we are not alone in it anymore.

We begin to realize that regret is not proof that we failed at anything. Not at all. It is often evidence that we loved, hoped, trusted, risked, stayed too long, left too soon, protected ourselves from crticism, or simply tried to make the best decision we could with the awareness we had at the time.

So it's all back to self-compassion... where many beginnings and ends happen. Compassion for our younger, callow selves, that once were warriors, making decisions with the pocket-full of knowledge they had back then.

Compassion for the almost always frightened parts of ourselves that confused safety with certainty. Compassion for the fact that walking on two legs, means we cannot fully know the consequence of any choice while we are living in the moment of it.

As they say.. (and I am not googling who said this)

"We only understand our lives looking backward. But we must live them looking forward".

On Platform 13, wholeness isn’t found - it’s remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.