I checked out a book from the library that I’ve not really been able to get into reading. But it was not a complete waste (checking out a book seldom is, even if I don’t actually read it), because I found this quote at the beginning, which reminded me of some thoughts I was trying to develop several months ago:
History begins only at the point where things go wrong; history is born only with trouble, with perplexity, with regret. So that hard on the heels of the Why comes the sly and wistful word If. If it hand not been for… If only… Were it not… Those useless Ifs of history. And, constantly impeding, deflecting, distracting the backward searchings of the question why, exists this other form of retrogression: If only we could have it back. A New Beginning. If only we could return…
To get the technicalities out of the way, the quote is from Evening is the Whole Day, by Preeta Samarasan, and she is quoting Graham Swift in Waterland.
I don’t think I’ve completely sorted out all the complexities of that quote, which is no surprise, because I often enjoy reading things that I only understand 15 to 25 percent of. It stretches my brain, it makes me think, it makes me think outside my own natural box and ponder things from different perspectives, and sometimes it makes me think of things that weren’t exactly the point of the quote.
In this case, the quote served as a trigger to my previous thoughts on regret. My life has taken some pretty rough turns and gone down paths that I’d rather not have gone down. But I end up a bit baffled sometimes because it seems like people expect me to have more regrets than I do.
I find that often there is a tendency for people to want to analyze every single decision and find “the thing” that they (or I) did wrong which could have prevented the outcome that happened. There is a sense in which the regret that comes from that seems to be therapeutic. If I can find something to regret, I can place guilt (or perhaps shame) someplace/anyplace and make some sense of what happened, and maybe over assure myself that I won’t let THAT happen again. I don’t know for sure. I think those are a couple of the functions and benefits of regret. Perhaps you can think of some more?
As a disclaimer before I get where I’m going with this, when I talk about not really giving much space to regret, I’m not against looking at cause and effect and making connections. We learn that way. We run by the pool, slip on the slippery surface and back up in our minds and come to the conclusion that we could have likely avoided that skinned knee by being a bit more careful on a slippery surface. A lot of wisdom is gained by looking carefully and reflecting on the past, and then learning from it.
But, if we make regret carry more certainty that it should, I believe we make a grave error.
I was thinking that regret is often to the past what fantasy is to the future. A big picture imagining that becomes realer than real.
The problem about regret is not what it does know–I did this and this happened–but the confident assumptions and assertions of what it doesn’t know–if I’d have done this other thing, things would have been much better.
But regret, unlike what really did happen, (and like fantasy) is created in an ideal, imagined world. The alternative possibility(ies) that make up regret, were they lived out, though, would have been lived out, not in that ideal imagined world, but in just as complicated, complex and often messed up world as the original action/choice.
I’m not against being sad about choices made and actions done which caused pain. I’m just against letting the fantasy reality of regrets fuel the sadness and grief into some sort of absolutely certain, “Things would have been better if I had done this other thing.”
That kind of thinking feels very similar to the fantastic thinking of fantasies: Things would be absolutely wonderful and certainly infinitely better than they are now, if only THIS were true.
It’s just not realistic. And neither, I’m thinking are regrets the way I mostly hear them used. Give me grief and sadness and when I really see that I have certainly blown something, repentance. Regret, though, does not feel productive, in that it purports to know with certainty what can’t be known and longs for the changing of a past in ways that can’t be changed. Regret doesn’t even seem to honestly accept or reflect reality.
“The useless Ifs of history…” I’m all for learning from my past. I’m not for trying to reinvent it. I’d rather allow the past to be what it is. Remembering the past accurately is important to me. It is what it is. It’s what has made me who and what I am today–all of me the good, the bad, the traumatized, the confident, the strengths, the weaknesses. To try to imagine, with the help of regret, how things could have been different, immediately begins a hugely impossible task. There are too many variables too complexly intertwined with each other to say with certainty “If I had done this differently” or “If so and so had done that differently” X would have happened. I am not even convinced we can say with certainty, “If…. then Y would NOT have happened.” All we can say with certainty is X happened. And grieve it or rejoice in it, or, usually, some difficult combination.
What I know is, This is what happened. This is Who I am. There is a lot of happiness and there is a lot of grief in the past. It most certainly continues to affect me and shape who I am, but I cannot live in the past, trying to make it more palatable or rework it like a video game where I get a second chance to make it work out differently. I can live in the present, remembering and making space for the past–the good, the bad, the ugly. But I cannot live in the past, and usually I think that is what Regret does.
What are your thoughts? As definitive as I sound, I’m still thinking through these things and open to the possibility that I’m making more of the semantics of “regret” than is really there.
If I wrote a regret fantasy, a novel, it would be about myself going back in time to just after I was married but armed with everything I know now.
It would start with me having this unflappable belief that “this time” I could make the whole thing work. I’d know what to say to keep my ex from sliding away from me, from Christ, from everything. And things would truly go differently. I’d do better at work because I was better a work relationships. I’d do better at home because my head would be screwed on straight. A couple of huge mistakes I’d made the first time would be successfully avoided.
And then the core problem would manifest itself again.
And I’d find myself struggling with the same conflicting desires I had the first time. I’d find the same rock-hard obstacles in myself and in her just as adamantine, and the same wishes just as compelling. And I think I’d be just as helpless to as I was the first time. I remember searching high and low, left and right, spiritual and physical, publicly and in solitude for any solution to the questions our differences put to our lives. In my novel, I’d remember walking those paths, and then I’d be forced to walk them again, and I’d still find no way out.
I’d curse the power of fate.
In the end, I’d develop a bit of respect for the me I was twenty years ago. Twenty years didn’t change me that much, all things told, and I think I’d make the same mistakes all over again, just at more critical junctures. I’d find myself trapped by the same things. I wouldn’t fight the wrong fights like I did the first time, but I’d have to fight the same fights when the right time came.
And I think, when all was said and done, my story would end with me giving up much, much sooner and regretting the chance to live out my fantasy.
I also think I’d realize that it was never fate. It was that the fall in those two people was much, much stronger than I’d ever imagined. And realizing that, I’d lean much harder into the Lord for support.
Great subject.
Yes, Codepoke, I think your story illustrates what I was trying to say–Regret is idealistic, but life was lived in reality, and the reliving of it would also be lived in reality. Even if some things were different if we relived the past, it’s doubtful things would be Perfectly Rosy or that we’d find the secret to living that past life perfectly, and somehow get it so right that no deep sorrows would come into it, of our own making or with the help of others.
But, somehow, your last line, for me, is the hopefulness of being able to live life today without regret. Because,
…if the thing one would change about the past would be leaning harder into the Lord for support and
…if that would be a good thing even though it wouldn’t necessarily change the past to something fantastically perfect,
…then that is the very thing that makes living today, shaped and painful as today is by the past, able to be lived in a way that the past, with all its cause and effect contribution to today, doesn’t have to be regretted, even while it might be mourned.
Really, if the thing I’ve most learned from living the past is to cling fiercely, like Habakkuk, to the Lord, then though I have no interest in reliving the particular trials of the past, I can’t regret them.
It’s a tricky thing, because I’m no masochist and I’m not glorifying the sufferings of the past or the present. I wish I never had to walk through any really tough times. I don’t look back and feel the pain of what I’ve walked through with happy nostalgia because of any benefit of character or faith it has reaped in my life. I’m just saying, coming to peace with the past–in an honest way–isn’t through creating a more perfect scenario in my head of how it would have been different.
Realizing how perfectly imperfect the past was and finding hope and faith growing out of that past, is what gives me hope and faith and maybe even a little courage for living in today’s perfectly imperfect reality without despair.
Thanks for adding to the dialogue as I continue to think through these things.
Regret -to feel sorry and sad about something previously done or said that now appears wrong, mistaken, or hurtful to others.
Looking at the word from the prospective of being sorry for something done or a mistake I do have regrets. I regret not making my mom see a doctor before it was too late. She told me if anything ever happens to my heart take me to Tulsa. I don’t regret my last day with her. I spent quality time with her. I said I love you and I really do love her. Think that we can honestly say that we have regrets.
I’ve lived a fun life with bumps along the way. Darn optimist that I am I can still see that good stuff oozing out from under the bad stuff.
So do I regret picking the wrong man? If I look at the definition then yes.
But I can say this-I believe that God wanted my children on this earth even when they are making me crazy like right now. He may have wanted me to wait for a different path but it’s the one that He walked with me. And Codepoke is right if we could go back we would make the same mistakes at different times. We are after all, who we are.
Leaning hard on God.
Thank you, Milly. I’ve been sitting on your comment and rethinking what I was trying to say since reading it. I’m looking at the definition of regret you’ve given, and can agree that, based on this definition, regret is a normal part of life. However, I think there is a semantic something going on here, where I’m struggling to articulate something using the word “regret” that has to do with more than feeling sorry or sad about things one has done.
I don’t know of a word other than regret to express the idea that, “I fervently wish I had done X instead of Y.” That is the idea that I am struggling with(or rather, at times, struggling with NOT struggling with…)
I find people often want me to regret more strongly things that turned out terribly, as if alternative choices in the past would have led to definitive better results. I think people want to make sense of some of the painful things that have happened to me, and if they can figure out a formula–you shouldn’t have done X (and there are any # of Xs that could be explored to see if they are at “fault”), because then Y wouldn’t have happened–then they can, I don’t know, perhaps feel more protected (or wise?) themselves?
These are the kinds of things I’m getting at when I think about regret as fantasy. I have learned from mistakes and wrongs I have done. Grief and sorrow, I know a lot of–both from my own choices and the actions of others that have affected me deeply.
But the semantic idea I’m trying to get at when I ponder this topic, is the kind of sadness and grief that people have where they continue to either become paralyzed by the past, or run screaming in the opposite direction. I see people beat themselves up over the past, infusing what happened with a precise certainty about cause and effect that seems quite idealistic (and I mean idealism even about negative things) given the complexity of life in general.
Seldom is anything clearcut cause and effect. This plus this equals that with nothing else in the mix. And, certainly, speculation that had I done this one other thing differently, things would have certainly turned out wonderful, seems to me to be a form of fantasy turned backwards.
Could you have made your Mom see a doctor sooner? I don’t know. Would it have made all the difference? I don’t know. How much sooner would have been soon enough to make a difference? Or would sooner, when you might have known still have been too late to make a difference? I’m so sorry with you for how hard it is to miss one’s Mom. And I’m happy with you that you could be there for her on her last day. Those are the things we know with certainty and grieve–your Mom is gone and you miss her. It seems much less than certain, though, that you should have to bear a heaviness that your not doing a specific thing is what may have caused her to die when she did. Perhaps. But, “perhaps” is an awfully imprecise thing to base such a heavy and precise weight upon.
After I read your definition of regret and pondered it for a while, I began to look more closely at definitions of regret (and see how, truly, I am using the word with a different type of meaning than in the technical definition. Again, though, there is something I see that I’m calling regret that the definitions don’t get at. And that thing–that something more than sorrow and grief–I see happen to people. Any suggestions on a better word for me to use to describe that thing that is bigger than sorrow or grief for looking backwards?) Anyway, while I was looking around online, I found an article about a book being written (by Lawrence Force and Paul Schwartz) called Regret, The Cruelest Emotion: Lessons Learned. It has given me more to think about, and I hope to blog about my thoughts more. I do hope you will keep dialoguing with me, as my thoughts are very much still in process.
I wonder, too, if besides semantics being an issue in this discussion, if personality also comes into play with regards to how different people reconcile and come to terms with the hard things we’ve faced in the past–both at our own hand and the hands of others. Again, I’m thinking out loud here, and hope you will keep adding your thoughts in.
Milly, Here’s a shorter response (hope I didn’t overwhelm with all the words there, but if you didn’t like wordiness, I’m guessing you’d have stopped reading my blog a while ago!):
“but it’s the one that He walked with me…” I agree, and that does get at part of the heart of my attitude about regret. I certainly don’t go looking for suffering so I can “prove” the faithfulness of God. I try to avoid it anywhere/anyway I can.
But, the past was what it was, and it was the place I experienced the faithfulness of God. I’ve experienced His faithfulness in some glorious moments and some pretty tough ones. And I’m not glorifying those tough ones as if it’s something I’d ever want to go through again. Would I trade those moments if I could? To be honest, it’s too hypothetical to know. If it were just the tough times I could change out, sure. But how can I regret and wish to change those moments if it were going to affect all the other things and bring me to some other (unknown) place than where I’m at today?
I still grieve and lament the tough stuff, and I still live with some tough stuff that came out of tough stuff from the past. But I can’t regret (at least not definitively and thoroughly) the road I’ve walked with God and human companions, if it meant backing up and undoing what I’ve shared in those relationships. I won’t say it was worth it. But I will say I don’t regret it.
(Well, “shorter” didn’t actually end up meaning “short,” did it?)
If I liked shorter posts I’d be hanging with other bloggers. ;-}
My point was under the definition I’d think that most adults have a regret or two in their bag. Could I believe that I could have changed things say for my mom? No way. She made the choices. Her doctor made the choice of not running tests that were obviously needed instead he sent her home. She died the next day. I made the choice of walking into that hospital and telling the chief of staff that the doctor made a huge mistake in not knowing what women went through when her heart went wrong. I do think that he was a better doctor because of that mistake? I pray so. Does he have regret from making such a huge mistake? I hope not. Had he gotten it right she most likely would have died anyway. I did my research.
Do we have a better word for wanting for a different choice? Or feeling stupid for the choices made?
I think the word does depend on how you’re placing emotion. I want, at times, to have made better choices. Is that regret?
Guilt is something I don’t hold though. I did it. I admit it. I apologize. Let’s move on.
Is that narcissistic?
;-}
More to say but my sis just came in
I’m enjoying the conversation, Milly, and have been thinking about it lots. Thanks for adding some more to it. This is a super crazy week for me, the last before school starts. I’m having a running conversation in my head about regrets. So I’m not ignoring your comment. You just couldn’t have known that I was conversing with your words, since the whole conversation has been happening in my head while I run to and fro. Now, THAT’S probably narcissistic
Looking forward to picking the topic back up with real people in a few days, if things settle into some sort of manageable reality again.
School starts today for us. I’ve been running like a crazy person also. I do the same thing with my thoughts,