Living with Regrets

By Dan Wilson

“If only I had . . . .”

  Raise your hand if you have never completed that sentence.  I didn’t think so.  Not one of you raised your hand.  Not that I can see you, of course, but I’ve been around long enough to know that no one travels very far through life without experiencing regrets.  Sometimes they are things we’ve done and other times things we failed to do. . . .  I didn’t raise my hand either, by the way.

For me it was college.  Rather than being a time of adventure and discovery, of hope and preparation for the future, college was a time in my life of chaos and confusion.  If only I had attended a smaller college rather than a large university, I’ve often thought.  Perhaps a smaller environment would have provided clearer vision and greater focus.  If only I could do it over again.  Then again, what if I had?  What if I had attended a different school, how would I have met my lovely wife who produced our two wonderful sons who married our beautiful daughters-in-law who will soon bear our first two grandchildren?  If I had done it differently, how would I have this awesome life I have today?

“Make the most of your regrets,” advised Henry David Thoreau.  But how, we ask ourselves?  Regrets are consequences that occur from our failures and mistakes, from making the wrong choices when we’ve encountered forks in the road.  But even those wrong paths we choose may be paved with blessings, sometimes enormous ones, if we will recognize them.  It is in recognizing those blessings and expanding upon them that we make the most of our regrets.

“If only I had . . . .” is a common remark we all make from time to time.  It’s our way of imagining what might have been had we chosen a different path.  But let us not forget that regrets can only be redeemed in what we did with the choices we made, not the ones we didn’t.