on having regrets
Regrets may not sound so bad, but they’re harder to get over than real crimes.
According to legend, the great French chanteuse, Edith Piaf, was born on a pavement, dated a pimp, gave birth at 17 to a daughter who died at two, got tried for being accessory to a murder, and dumped Yves Montand for daring to be as famous as her. So when, in her signature song, she claims, ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’, it has a certain resonance. Her voice rises with a noble defiance, as if to say ‘For all my mistakes, I’ve lived life to the full’.
We might consider the pain of regret to be the very opposite of the pleasure of nostalgia, but if Piaf’s song is anything to go by, regrets are not to be regretted. To live a life without them is to live it without making mistakes, and so never agreeing to the adventure that life offers. You could, in other words, end up regretting having nothing to regret.
But what about the regrets that genuinely trouble you? These are the decisions you wish you hadn’t taken and can’t forgive yourself, like sleeping with someone you shouldn’t have, or betraying a friend. And although they’re likely to concern personal choices you’ve made that are more immoral than illegal, and fall a long way short of anything criminal, there’s an irony. Whereas a crime gets dealt with in court, and is ultimately cancelled out by the punishment it leads to, a regret doesn’t usually reach the public domain, and so may be harder to move on from. A personal regret sits undigested in the mind, a private mistake you might rue forever.
Apart from that difficulty in reaching closure, what makes regret so painful is that it’s a part of you you can’t reconcile with yourself, and sticks more stubbornly than things you’re proud of - which is why we tend to have more regrets than we divulge. No one knows your regrets more intimately than you do, and so, for all their painfulness, thinking about them is one of the best ways of getting to know who you are, warts and all.
Regrets? We’ve all had a few, but then again, they can tell you who you are.
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