No Regrets...........?

‘No one on their death bed, says ‘I wish I had out more hours in at the office’ and I don’t think anyone ever says ‘Ooo I wish I hadn’t eaten that bread or cream or cheese!’ – Nigella Lawson.

Life is made up of series of events that develop us, help us to learn and create a direction for us. We make daily, sometimes hourly decisions that conscience or unconsciously shape our lives and the subsequent paths that we take. From small things like what food we put in our body to the relationships we enter into, decisions can follow us for the rest of our lives and will always add to the rich tapestry of experience that we call our lives. But what happens when we make a decision and they do not give us the outcome we thought or hoped that they would. Sometimes it’s wishing we had missed that first kiss, seeing that a friend couldn’t be trusted or that the second piece of cake really would make a difference to the way that dress fits. After the initial pain has faded, slowly in trickles the regret and the realisation that we can’t change the past hits us, often hard. We have to live with the regret that we gave our dreams away, trusting someone who carelessly let them go. It is the regret that berets us and hurts the most. The feeling powerless to change the past can play over and over in your mind whilst you wonder time after time why you didn’t make the other choice. It is a cruel but un negotiable fact of life that regrets will happen to us all.

Adele reliably informs us that ‘regrets and mistakes are memories made’ and maybe that how we should look at our past. At some point what feels like a regret will be a memory shared with a smile, the self punishment we serve ourselves at the mistakes we made becomes forgiveness and a new chapter. The big question is, after all the pain has gone and we have moved on, would we do it again, would we make those choices, would we eat that cake, let that first kiss happen or change jobs if had known what would happen? There is an old proverb that advises us to never regret any thing because at one time it was exactly what we wanted. But maybe it is choice, the choices that we once wanted, not chance that determines our destiny and we will always regret those choices we fail to make more than the ones we did make.

When I look back over my own life I genuinely only have a few regrets. I don’t regret the things I have done or the choices I have made, but more I regret the things i didn’t do when I had the chance to. I regret not saying yes more, I regret not telling a person who I cared about how I really felt about them, I regret not putting the cake down and I very much regret not buying the Jimmy Choo’s with 50% off. So maybe it is about not regretting something that already happened, you are not going to change the past but you can change the future.

Don’t ever regret the past, it happened for a reason xX