#why regret

[twelvehourdays]

What does regret look like?

There seem to be numerous amounts of quotes that go to the effect of, "It's better to make mistakes than to not have done," or "The only true regret is a life not lived," or "Don't waste your time regretting what you have done, regret only that which you did not do," &c., &c., &c. Even worse, there are those quotes about how a life lived with sincerity cannot be faulted.

Ugh. Barf. So, what is it that we loathe and fear so much about regret? Why must we simultaneously regret nothing we've done, usually when considering mistakes made, and yet regret those things we did NOT do? Or, in the same breath, also never regret anything we've done or not done, but rather, continue to plow on, onward, ever forward, endlessly, without reflection. 

To regret requires reflection when one realizes that s/he must sit quietly, alone pondering the past for which s/he must not feel regret, but s/he is pondering it (the past), so some reflection must take place even though that pondering cannot raise any sort of feeling, if that feeling is regret.

We're basically asking ourselves to not look back at our lives, but if we do and we feel regret, then it's better to push those feelings away, ultimately saying that it's better to feel nothing at all than to feel regret. 

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Also posted HERE on Medium.com

[enigmaofiname]

I question everyone who regrets their past. Why? Because I wonder how you can regret something that you wanted at one point in life.

[warwiththeeskimos]

Why Regret?, Galway Kinnell

Didn't you like the way the ants help the peony globes open by eating the glue off? Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable, in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe baloney on white with fluorescent mustard? Wasn't it a revelation to waggle from the estuary all the way up the river, the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck, the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring? Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old Webster's New International, perhaps having just eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon? What did you imagine lies in wait anyway at the end of a world whose sub-substance is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck? Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren and how little flesh is needed to make a song. Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph split open and the mayfly struggled free and flew and perched and then its own back broke open and the imago, the true adult, somersaulted out and took flight, seeking the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial, alimentary canal come to a stop, a day or hour left to find the desired one? Or when Casanova took up the platter of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff out the window, telling his startled companion, "The perfected lover does not eat." As a child, didn't you find it calming to imagine pinworms as some kind of tiny batons giving cadence to the squeezes and releases around the downward march of debris? Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs what seemed your own inner blazonry flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air? Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy hinged beings, and then their offspring, and then their offspring's offspring, could navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico, to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree, by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors who fell in this same migration a year ago? Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert to wake in the night and find ourselves holding hands in our sleep?

[rinascente]

Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert to wake in the night and find ourselves holding hands in our sleep?

Galway Kinnell, Why Regret?