Can I Live With No Regrets?

This week I’ve been thinking about life, things I’ve done, what has happened throughout the years, and how much I have learned from all my different experiences. Like everyone, I have had good times and bad times; but what caught my attention this week while I was down ‘memory lane’, was that after tracing each memory, I never felt regret, as long as I had taken the courage to do something with my life. The decisions that had led me down certain paths, I saw them in a different angle. I was able to find something that I had learned from each experience, and this helped me feel no regrets about anything.

If you never try, you never get to enjoy the scenery.

This was quite a big change because in the past, as a perfectionist, I would constantly think, “What if I had done X thing different? What if I had said Y instead of Z? What if I had reacted this way to that event?” All of these questions showed me that no matter what I did or how I did it, it was never good enough, there was ALWAYS a better option, and I didn’t like that very much. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t strive for the best in ourselves, I just feel that letting go of those questions ‘liberates’ us from the negatively critical eye that has the stronger tendency to discourage us in the future.

We all know that there is no such thing as perfection, everything in this earthly life can be bettered, improved, polished; the problem is that if we constantly strive for greatness and perfection, and we never give ourselves a break or some credit for our independent decisions and actions, then we are going to get tired, discouraged, and demotivated. This might sound selfish but, in the long run, you are the person that matters most! Let me explain; at the end of the day we will have to live with ourselves first, and if what we see in the mirror doesn’t please us, then that will make our lives very difficult. Life is filled with second chances; I believe that there is nothing you can do for which you cannot later redeem yourself (speaking in relatively rational terms). The mistakes we make, serve to teach us how to be better, they should not be taken as a sign to not do something ever again; mistakes are ‘character frames’ and not stop signs along the road.

What I’ve learned is that sooner or later, we have to start seeing things differently, in the sense that it is better to gaze upon all the new things that our mistakes teach us, than to be purely blinded by the unjustifiable regret that disables us from looking forward. Good or bad, happy or sad, difficult or enjoyable, all experiences and decisions are our ‘teachers’. Without trying things, we cannot know what could have happened, what opportunities we could have lost; I’ve reached the conclusion that the ONLY things we will ever regret in our entire lives, are the things we did not have the courage to do; because those are the experiences we missed out on, those are the outcomes that were left unexplored and the paths left untrodden.

What I tell myself everyday (and others as well ;p) is this, “Try new things, try the new flavours that you thought you wouldn’t like, go to the park, talk to the strangers that are sitting around you in the lecture hall, do everything you want to do, everything that scares you; the whole point is to take a risk and make those ‘challenging’ decisions (just like you do the easy ones), but always keep trying things, don’t stop.” I tell myself this over and over, as much as I need to, whenever I’m thinking of stoping myself from doing something out of fear that I will regret it; I’ve decided that it is best to try something, make a mistake, and learn from that, than to stay inside my ‘shell’ and miss out on the extraordinary opportunities that each beautiful day offers. To conclude, I have recently started to do this myself but I always like this as an advice when asked, “Do the things that scare you the most, because only then will you truly know your inner potential to be free.”

‘Till next time…