When I was in high school, I had a phenomenal teacher named Mrs. Pearson and she gave us an assignment to come up with a unique way to sign our friends’ yearbooks. Develop a catchphrase beyond the cliched “stay sweet and keep in touch”.
I came up with:
Enjoy the good,
learn from the bad
and regret nothing.
And I’ve tried to live that way.
But I don’t know.
Enjoy the good? I often find myself wondering when the good will end. Is it too good to be true? When is the other shoe going to drop? Or I missed the good altogether because I was busy working, or worrying.
Learn from the bad? Well, I put “quick learner” on my resume, but I sure have had to make some mistakes more than once to really learn the lesson.
And that brings us to…regret nothing. Nothing?
First of all, I only define a regret as something I had reasonable control over. So I can not hold a regret over someone else’s choices, someone else’s behavior, or the San Francisco Giant’s.
But I do have regrets. There are situations I look back on that I would have handled so differently. I once told off a friend. Did she have it coming? Oh yes. Did I need to do it? Oh no. I had a more recent situation where a friend was struggling and I didn’t recognize it. Instead of helping, I think I made it worse.
There are opportunities I passed up. Others I didn’t (and wish I would have). There are people i’ve hurt. People I let hurt me. Things I’ve said. Things I haven’t said.
Maybe I should have stuck with “stay sweet and keep in touch.”
When I was going through a particularly rough time in my early twenties, someone lent me a copy of You Can Healy Your Life by Louise L. Hay. Marianne Williamson often quotes someone who said, “The truth shall set you free, but first it’s going to piss you off.” Well, Louise Hay shared some true things I needed to hear, and I threw the book across the room. (She wrote that might happen, too.)
Before my introduction to Louise Hay, I thought I had to always be perfect. She taught me that we always do the best we can with what we know at the time. That has helped me not to regret anything. Of course, there will always be situations I could have handled better, however, they’re learning experiences.
In the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, he states we should strive to do our best every day, however, keep in mind that our best may vary from day to day, depending upon how much sleep we got the night before, if we’re sick, etc. That’s also helped me to be kinder to myself and back away from regretting what I’ve done.
Sometimes we regret not taking an opportunity when it was presented to us; yet if we’d been ready, we would have taken it.
I like a quote from a SARK greeting card someone once gave me: “Have tea with someone dangerous.” It helps me to move beyond fear and just see what will happen. Dangerous folks are often very interesting people.
Lastly, if I were to come up with a catchphrase to share in anyone’s yearbook, it would be live authentically and fearlessly be yourself.