Homework #5 -- Regret
My teacher really liked this one. I think it sounds like something written for a high school graduation ceremony. That said, it's not bad.
Regret. It’s almost a silly word, a second cousin to “egret,” those long birds with lanky legs that we very nearly killed off last century so that their feathers could adorn the hats of well-born ladies. The word seems to belong to another place and time, one more civilized, where one could look into past deeds and softly sigh, the melodrama one feels as sweetly secure as a corseted lady’s bosom. That quaint antiquity is not some linguistic dinosaur, however, but rather a realization of maturity. Regret does not come without a certain degree of life experience.
Regret is not for children. One cannot understand regret until one understands loss, and with that knowledge is born the end of innocence. Unless you’ve known what it was to have any chance of redemption or reclamation fall away, to know that avenues have become irrevocably closed to you due to your own actions, how can you understand what regret is? Yet in that bittersweet notion, that keenly felt loss, there is a kind of salvation.
To regret is to begin to grasp that things fall away. Sometimes it is of our own volition, sometimes due to chance, but that ever-shifting tide of change is what rearranges our lives and allows us to move forward, just as ships are borne away by the ocean’s ebb and flow. We are able to know regret because we live. The path we are on enables us to see the path we might have taken; the thing we lost is that much more precious because of the things we have.
Our choices not only close off former avenues but also open new doors. We may regret what we left behind, but that sense of loss can strengthen our determination to move forward. Our mistakes and imperfect actions are the compost from which new achievements grow, because without the choices we made in the past, we would not be the people who stand here today.
I could tell you not to regret. I could say that time spent looking behind is wasted, that you should look at life as a whole and focus on the future. I won’t. Instead, I encourage you to indulge in regret. Look back. Do it with sentimentality at least once, grieving perhaps for the ghosts of what might have been. Once your mourning has passed, though, honor your regrets. Draw strength from them for the choices of the future. Wear them proudly, like showy egret feathers on a wide Victorian bonnet, so that others may see your scars and know you survived.
I promise-you won’t regret it.
Regret. It’s almost a silly word, a second cousin to “egret,” those long birds with lanky legs that we very nearly killed off last century so that their feathers could adorn the hats of well-born ladies. The word seems to belong to another place and time, one more civilized, where one could look into past deeds and softly sigh, the melodrama one feels as sweetly secure as a corseted lady’s bosom. That quaint antiquity is not some linguistic dinosaur, however, but rather a realization of maturity. Regret does not come without a certain degree of life experience.
Regret is not for children. One cannot understand regret until one understands loss, and with that knowledge is born the end of innocence. Unless you’ve known what it was to have any chance of redemption or reclamation fall away, to know that avenues have become irrevocably closed to you due to your own actions, how can you understand what regret is? Yet in that bittersweet notion, that keenly felt loss, there is a kind of salvation.
To regret is to begin to grasp that things fall away. Sometimes it is of our own volition, sometimes due to chance, but that ever-shifting tide of change is what rearranges our lives and allows us to move forward, just as ships are borne away by the ocean’s ebb and flow. We are able to know regret because we live. The path we are on enables us to see the path we might have taken; the thing we lost is that much more precious because of the things we have.
Our choices not only close off former avenues but also open new doors. We may regret what we left behind, but that sense of loss can strengthen our determination to move forward. Our mistakes and imperfect actions are the compost from which new achievements grow, because without the choices we made in the past, we would not be the people who stand here today.
I could tell you not to regret. I could say that time spent looking behind is wasted, that you should look at life as a whole and focus on the future. I won’t. Instead, I encourage you to indulge in regret. Look back. Do it with sentimentality at least once, grieving perhaps for the ghosts of what might have been. Once your mourning has passed, though, honor your regrets. Draw strength from them for the choices of the future. Wear them proudly, like showy egret feathers on a wide Victorian bonnet, so that others may see your scars and know you survived.
I promise-you won’t regret it.