“No Regrets” is a common mentality in going about life. It is a very popular outlook on a future of guilt-free happiness. But frankly, it doesn’t really make sense, does it?
People everywhere say it, post it, and add it to their info and descriptions on social networks. To have no regrets in how your life has gone and what mistakes you have made is the new psychological medication for a healthy progression through life. No looking back. But it’s a contradiction in and of its self if you think about it. A mistake is a choice you have made that you have realized to be the wrong one. Considering it to be the wrong decision means that you recognize that things would have been better if you had made the right decision. You can’t say you don’t regret a mistake, because that in and of itself is contradictory.
Regret and Guilt are not the same thing. Guilt is a haunting that perpetually plagues your mind in conscious sorrow and depression. It clings to the past, forever looking back at the mistake you’ve made. Regret, however, is the simple acknowledgement that a mistake was made, however intense the feeling of regret may be depending on the particular mistake. When you regret something, you are saying that you believe it was the wrong decision to make, as opposed to the right decision to make at the time. Therefore, in saying it was a wrong decision, you believe it should have been different and would be better if it was different. So when you regret something, you wish you could have made the right choice. Regret doesn’t have to be accompanied by Guilt. It can be, but they are entirely different and separate things. Guilt is a conscious element of sorrow. Regret is not conscious. It is the disposition that defines your thoughts on your mistakes, recognizing and defining them as wrong. It is not always conscious or thought about. Only acknowledged when the questioning of a choice or a mistake has been brought up.
Saying you regret something is not the same as saying you are living in the damaging Guilt of it.
Most people in this day and age would say that they wouldn’t change a thing if they could go back and choose differently. But that is saying that they have never made a mistake or made a wrong choice. Is there really such thing as perfect people like that, who never, have never, and will never do anything wrong? When a situation is presented to someone where a choice has to be made, if they say that they made the wrong decision, they are saying that the situation and its results went wrong. And by saying that, they acknowledge that the outcome and its fallowing results would have been better if the right decision had been made. So how could someone look back on a mistake and say they wouldn’t change it? That seems fairly ignorant and stupid.
A lot of people believe that you can’t grow without experience. That you can’t learn without slipping up and growing from those slip ups. That makes sense, after all, when you do something wrong, in recognizing that it was a mistake, you learn and grow from it. That’s why people say that they wouldn’t change a thing if they could go back and do everything differently, because that wouldn’t make them who they are now. But has anyone ever thought that maybe you can grow and learn even more from making the right decision than you would making the wrong one to begin with. When a situation presents itself where you have to choose to either make the right decision or the wrong one, if you have the strength and the wits to make the right choice, you sure as hell grow in strength a lot more then you would if you were ignorant and naïve enough to make the wrong one. How can I strengthen myself if I never succeed in making the decision to work out. Yes you can learn and grow from your mistakes, but you can grow stronger than you would by making the right decision to begin with. That’s why it’s called “right” and “wrong”. People use the excuse that they wouldn’t be who they are now without making those mistakes to blind themselves to the wrong they have done and the damage that wrong has done that could have been avoided or the opposite if they hadn’t made those mistakes to begin with.
Sometimes we must Fall
In order to Rise
But if you can Rise without Falling
Then don’t Fall into these Lies
That doesn’t mean that we have to perpetually feel bad for our mistakes. That would be living in Guilt. And that has its place and time. But it is not permanent and never should be. Regret is permanent. It is not a feeling or a dark sorrow that drags you down. It is just the acknowledgement that what choice was made was a mistake. It is what allows us to grow. Without Regret, we couldn’t possibly grow. If I don’t regret the mistakes I have made, then I don’t realize the wrong in them that make them mistakes. “We are what we do”? That is only true in the moment. But truly, we are how we think. If I make a mistake that I am perfectly fine with having had made, then I don’t believe it was a mistake or that it was wrong, and that choice defines who I am. If I were to grow from making a wrong decision, I would have to recognize it as a mistake. And that in and of itself makes me a different man. We can’t grow without changing and progressing in life. That means recognizing and learning from what we have done right and what we have done wrong. We can’t call something wrong without regret in making that choice. And without that realizing, we could never grow or change from that choice. That choice would define us and who we are, and the similar choices we would make in the future.
I have a lot of regrets. I have no guilt, because that truly would suppress my growth from my mistakes. But hopefully, I will never look back at what I have done wrong and fail to recognize the wrong in those choices. I will forever learn from those wrong choices, BECAUSE I regret them.
