In the 80's it was said that we could hear satanic messages in rock music if we play the songs backwards. Recently I was told that if we play country music backwards, we will get our dog back, our wife will come back, so will our truck, and we will immediately sober up.

All jokes aside, we all have regrets.  But what is a regret really?

I will focus on regret by looking at its necessary preconditions, without which, regret is impossible.  Maybe then we can see it for what it is.

Precondition #1:  TIME

We are all equally advancing into the future one second at a time. The instance a moment is past, it is gone forever. Regret is that thing we did or failed to do that is locked forever inside of a past moment. No amount of effort within our will, nor emotional expense can unlock it. As we desperately grasp backwards, we are stretched until torn by those aspects of our life that continue to move forward with time.

Precondition #2:  AWARENESS

We all have varying degrees of awareness and consciousness. Awareness ebbs and flows. Regret requires that we are aware of alternate outcomes and the belief that something else was possible. Thus regret becomes more possible as we grow in our awareness of things.

If what I just said is true, then a regret is basically an assumption that we are treating as fact. Not the facts of cause and effect, but the fact that we could have done anything differently with the awareness we had when the moment was cast. In fact the cause-effect principle only worsens regret because in hindsight it always seems like we should have had more awareness than we actually did. 

If you struggle with regret, then you might be tenaciously holding on to the past because you have mistakenly concluded that altering the present or fixing the future is to be done back there. We can't spin our life's record backwards.

Our greatest regret will be spending so much on the missed opportunities of the past that we perpetually miss the opportunities in the present to regain our best life.

Have a great week.

k