Life is funny. The more years you experience, the more opportunity you have to reflect on each previous stage and reexamine your life choices. So many sliding door moments. Times when you were presented with alternate pathways and chose one over the other. How many times have you wished things were different?
Reflecting on the past can leave us feeling a sense of ‘what if’ as we notice where different choices may have been made. Asking ourselves the question ‘how would life have turned out differently?’ We have the benefit of hindsight knowing how our choices have played out. If only we could see the future at any given moment through a crystal ball. Letting it inform our decisions and keep us on the straight and narrow. Instead we rarely have a full sense of the factors around our life choices and our regrets can lead to a sense of personal guilt and bitterness. I’ve learnt that while it’s okay to take a temporary journey into the past to ponder life’s path, the reality is that each moment of decision has now well and truly gone.
Photo by Trevin Rudy on Unsplash
Recently Hubbie and I had a conversation around regrets. He was in reminiscent mode about the beloved Torana GTR-XU1 he owned when we first met. It was his pride and joy and for me impossible to drive. I also owned my little blue Datsun 180B so we each had our own means of transport when we married. Within 18 months our first child arrived and Hubbie made the difficult decision to sell his car so we could transport our new baby around. Back then children’s car restraints were bulky and for the first few months it was a crib sized capsule that graced our back seat. To this day my husband bemoans getting rid of that car, wishing he had kept it as a collector’s item which would have substantially increased in value over time. The only problem was that if he’d made the decision to keep it then it couldn’t be driven and had to be mothballed in a garage over the decades. Not a particularly practical or economical solution for our young family.
Once we are independent from our biological families we face a multitude of decisions around our life choices. Our career paths, where to live, renting or purchasing a home, getting married or staying single, having children or not… the list becomes long and at times fraught. These decisions are often made in our twenties. A time when we are only just emerging into adult life and brain maturity. Yet they can have far reaching impacts on our lives ahead.
Some of those decisions are far from straight forward. There is often an alternate choice and path that would have led to a different life experience. It could be the dream of a different career or place to live, increased wealth and a more comfortable existence or finding that partner who supports you throughout the changes in your life.
‘Until we accept the fact that there is nothing we can do to change the past, our feelings of regret will prevent us from designing a better future with the opportunity that is before us today’.
Jim Rohn
Hubbie and I married early and very soon after became parents. Our daughter did the same which led us to becoming grandparents in our late forties. While we would not change this decision now and have two wonderful children and a bunch of grandchildren to show for it, life was challenging. We quickly went from two salaries to one as we became a family. Thankfully those were the days Hubbie was in the military so we were able to have subsidized rent rather than the added stress of a mortgage. I don’t know how we would have managed. We came to home ownership later in our lives when we were both working full time and our children at school.
The flip-side of our decision to become parents early in life has been that our children were independent adults prior to our fifties. We had the opportunity to explore life once again as ‘just us’. In addition, due to our circumstances, we were in a position to choose to retire early. Somehow from the whirlwind of combining working and raising a family we had traversed three decades of our lives.
Without the major commitments of life we found ourselves with time to reflect. Individually we were trying to remember who we were in those early years. What were our own initial dreams, passions and priorities when we met. We were also trying to fathom who we were now and our priorities moving forward. Temporarily it became an independent journey as we lived apart for several years. Eventually we reconnected and found a comfortable compromise in our life together. After forty plus years of marriage it continues as a work in progress.
Looking back over life can cause a painful journey of regret. Alternatively it can create within us acceptance of the past and its unchangeable set of circumstances. Our focus can lie on the silver linings that come from the more challenging times. For us, if we had waited later to have children we wouldn’t have the gorgeous family we so enjoy now. We also moved away when our young adult children probably still needed us, yet it allowed us to purchase a property in a sought after location when prices were much lower. There has been some challenges with this decision as our grandchildren came along. We have been less involved in their lives and have had to work at maintaining our connections. There will also be some hurdles as we age living away from potential hands on family support. We’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.
Sometimes the words of the Serenity Prayer help us to handle past regret by showing us the bigger picture. The ability to accept what we can’t change and to have the courage to change the things we can. It’s words seem the antidote to focusing on regret. Instead viewing our life in its current entirety, in all its complexity, with the focus and motivation to move forward.
