Regrets & Solace
I was reading today that in the average every day life, every single living person in the world has regrets. Regret is part of the 'human condition'. So the saying 'No Regrets' is oddly just an axiom people toss around, which is by and large nothing more than a myth. As I was reading this article it became fairly apparent to me that even in my relatively taoistic approach to life, I have a pretty fair amount of 'regrets' in my life. In truth this was an odd realization, one that you would think would have been a pretty easy thing to identify, but over the course of my 30+ years now I have deceived even myself. Apparently at some point I decided to convince myself that I regret very little. A little self-examination while reading this article has proved to me that I have quite a few.
With each bit of this article that I read, I begun to really get introspective about the whole thing and in doing so I decided to meditate on it. I had a pretty deep internal problem with this because, despite various assertions to the contrary, I do -not- believe in telling lies. Even to myself. I may mislead someone, or let them believe some false conclusion that they arrive at on their own, I may even embellish in order to judge someone's worth in my eyes (such as dropping a name in a conversation just to see if the discussion makes it back to the named person) and I have refined this to an art form that would make Aes Sedai jealous. Yet at the core of -my- personal beliefs a brutal truth is better than an outright lie. So deceiving was pretty hard for me to accept.
After about an hour of meditating I explored a lot of thoughts on this. The first thing I considered was the simple fact that I genuinely lied to myself, convinced myself that I had only a handful of true regrets and that they weren't essentially my fault. Basically what I came to believe is that this isn't plausible, because right off the top of my head I know two of my most major regrets were -my- fault.
So I had to rethink this whole thing, but it was becoming troubling to concentrate. For me when I meditate I generally let everything go, let it wash away my stress, I have over time gotten out of the practice of using mediation for insights. A mistake I was starting to pay for because I couldn't get past all this. So, I got some tea, I got my anchor and I settled down a little more determined if, for nothing else, than to think this through.
As things do at times, it was during this time that I wasn't meditating, that I was thinking preparing to return to meditating but thinking of completely unrelated things, that it hit me. I'm not deceiving myself. I -do- have regrets, but I have over the course of time taken solace from those regrets in some way as that those regrets are not all completely negative for me.
I mentioned two of my most major regrets being my fault. One of them is Danielle. I truly regret that I never made a commitment to her, because to this day my failure with her has defined me, defined how I approach relationships, and I believe that had we have become an couple she would have continued to make profound changes in -me-. Yet... now she is a Doctor, she has a life that is just budding with success. I take solace in the fact that we never became a couple was -good- for her because I was self-destructive then. Yes, -she- would have helped -me- immensely, but would I have done the same? Almost certainly not. So while I feel tremendous regret over her, I also take enormous amounts of solace in the fact that at least I didn't damage her.
In the grand scheme of my introspection, I realized that I haven't deceived myself. What I have done is internally divided my regrets, categorized them. They're no less regrettable, but in a way the pain I feel is mitigated by the good that resulted in those decisions. Yin and Yang. Even without realizing it, my mind struck a balance that my heart found acceptable on many of my regrets.
This is truly the Way.