Don't Look Back in Anger

Several years ago a friend raved about a recent trip to a cooking school in Tuscany. She and 10 others stayed at this villa where you made and ate chef-instructed meals and took field trips in between. The setting was surreal, she said. The food, divine. Especially since every meal included fine wine. She wanted to go back with friends, so three of us made plans to go the following summer.

 

Then we didn’t go.

 

Let’s do this, I told my husband a few years later. He instead suggested we take one of those fancy train rides through the Canadian Rockies to celebrate a milestone anniversary. I looked into it and put down deposits, imagining views of Lake Louise and meals on wheels as the glass-ceiling train car rolled under canopies of aspens.

 

Then we didn’t go.

 

Booked a prized cabin in the middle of Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks so we could nestle among the ancient redwoods each night and explore beautiful lands each day. And, feeling adventurous, I paid in advance for three oceanfront rooms at a Hawaiian resort for eight of us to vacation together in Oahu.

 

Then we didn’t go.

 

The list of vacations scrapped goes on and on. Sometimes we canceled plans due to a job loss. Or a family loss. Or a pandemic. There always are reasons to push out an outing than keep with the original plan, especially if you have a dynamic career or kids or dying relatives. Maybe it’s just me constantly postponing experiences, but I don’t think so. Daniel Pink’s newest book is about regrets and based, in part, on tens of thousands of regrets collected from strangers. (You can read sample responses from different parts of the world.)

 

We sometimes say we want to live a life with no regrets, but to do so is impossible (or at least makes us impossible to live with). It means we never make choices or say no, and that just isn’t how adult life works. To study one field, we exclude all other considerations. To work in one industry, we cannot pursue another. Some of us have options for life partners and how many, if any, children we wish to raise. Rare is the person who made the right choice every time; more common is the person who rationalized a decision or action to diminish the pain of a poor choice.

 

One of the things Pink noticed is that the older we get, the more we regret not what we’ve done (slept with the boss, drove while drunk), but what we failed to do (take the trip, buy the motor home). That includes the experiences we opted out of, believing they’d be available again at a more convenient time or place. And now the people we intended to do them with are gone. Or our own health issues preclude ambitious plans. Or we've experienced a reversal of fortune. 

 

I regret the way I ended my marathon days. I regret going out for a pre-dawn run a few months ago, given all it cost me. I really regret not staying in closer contact with people who died unexpectedly. I regret that I didn’t cough up the funds and time to go to Tuscany when I had them. I regret not taking the cabin owners up on their rebooking discount right after Covid restrictions eased, now that the place is unaffordable and booked solid for the foreseeable future. 

 

I’m going to take Pink’s advice and use regret to fuel a better life ahead instead of focusing on what I let languish. I’m working up to a very long walk, which makes me giddy like preparing for a long run used to do. I’m rebooking that trip to Hawaii for all of us, even if airfares are going to be five times what we paid originally. And I’m going to get to Sequoia, even if the accommodations aren’t as nice or convenient.

 

As the British American journalist Sydney J. Harris once wrote, “Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”

 

Photo of South Coyote Butte several years ago with the same friend that invited me to Tuscany way back when. Not a bad consolation trip!