Kathy Eberlein suggested this topic a while ago and I had planned to focus upon it last spring. Life intervened, and I regret that. I just bought a six quart slow cooker, only to wonder if a four quart would have been the better size, and I regret that. I have not yet figured out how to use the slow cooker, so the dinner I made on Friday came out underdone, and I regret that. Shall I go on?

Regrets. Who among us has not felt their dull heaviness, or their sharp cuts? Like corn kernels over a flame, when one pops open, a whole host follows. Many of us have regrets and today I am wondering what purpose they serve and how best to deal with them. Would that we could say, with Walt Whitman:

I exist as I am, that is enough,

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

And if each and all be aware I sit content.

One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself.

And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,

I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait. (from Leaves of Grass)

Alas, most of us do not exhibit Whitman’s equanimity. Perhaps the closest we come is the wish expressed by Arthur Miller: “Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right20regrets.”

Regret is a feeling of disappointment, distress or sorrow over the wish that something in the past could have been different. It often comes with a kind of helplessness because we cannot change the past and do not know what to do with the dissatisfaction we feel about it in the present. Regret is not an easy feeling to experience. At the same time I cannot imagine anyone living for very long and not finding him/herself wishing that something in the past had turned out differently. In that sense regret seems almost inevitable. It can paralyze us and trap us in the past. Regret can also make us stronger and point the way toward a different future.

Those who study regret note that it occurs among virtually all ages and cultures and that it is a complex feat of human cognition. “If you talk about the emotion of regret, you want to differentiate that from simpler emotions like pain and fear, which seem to be experienced pretty much the same way by animals. Regret is a very complicated emotion that involves all these things coming together -- it’s raw feeling plus all of the complicated imaginings of future possibility,” says Dr. Neal Roese, psychology professor. In order to feel regret, one has to stand in the past and project a different scenario for the future. If I hadn’t done that, said that, then things would be better now. Regret’s favorite words are “What if?”

Two roads diverged in 
a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could 

To where it bent in the undergrowth; 



Then took the other, as just as fair, 

And having perhaps the better claim, 

Because it was grassy and wanted wear; 

Though as for that the passing there 

Had worn them really about the same, 



And both that morning equally lay 

In leaves no step had trodden black. 

Oh, I kept the first for another day! 

Yet knowing how way leads on to way, 

I doubted if I should ever come back. 



I shall be telling this with a sigh 

Somewhere ages and ages hence: 

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- 

I took the one less traveled by, 

And that has made all the difference.     (Robert Frost, The Road Less Travelled)

Our regrets emerge from the choices we make, conscious and unconscious. Conscious choices require us to think in terms of future what-if’s in order to try to discern what we really want, what is really possible, and what will serve us the best. Yet all choice involves a loss, a risk, the unknown. What school will I attend? What work will I choose? What person will I not choose? Where will I live? What will I have for dinner? What to wear today? Sometimes we play with alternative choices and re-write history as a way to make sense of our lives. What if I had not met you? Wha t if I had moved to the west coast? What if I had stayed in that teaching job? The sting of regret might signal a less than optimal choice, or a restlessness in a current situation, or some unfinished business. It happens that the more choices we have, the less satisfied we are with the results. When faced with too many choices, some of us opt out of making any choice at all, which itself becomes a source of regret. When I stand in front of a shelf full of vitamins and various supplements and see all the different stuff I could buy, I feel overwhelmed and often leave the store with nothing. Again from Neal Roese, “Regret is not something that’s just a curse or a nuisance to our daily living. It’s an indicator of our brains trying their best to guide us through complicated social environments.” Henry David Thoreau said it more poetically: “Make the most of your regrets. To regret deeply is to live afresh.”

Make the most of our regrets? But regrets come in many layers, some helpful, some harmful. How can we distinguish between them and use our regret as a guide for when we need to make amends or repair relationship or take responsibility or make changes? How can we learn to tame, even let go of, the regret that only bombards us with the tyranny of our internal worlds of “should?” Or the regret that pulls us into the black holes of our insecurities? How can we recognize regret for what it represents? How can we make use of what it has to offer?

We might want to understand the nature of our regret. What flavors does it come in? In what guises does it present itself to us? There are many possibilities. As we uncover the reasons why we feel regret, why we wish something in the past had been different, we learn a lot about what we really think, what we expect, even what we fear. The sources of our regret differentiate helpful from unhelpful regret. First, some of the more helpful faces.

Regret can arise as an adjunct to our need for a sense of power and control over ourselves and our lives. This isn’t a bad thing. We need to believe we can do differently in order to do differently. The person who looks back and says, with regret, “Why did I say such a stupid thing? How could I have been such an idiot?” might be a person trying to figure out how to avoid negative consequences next time. We can berate ourselves for past actions as a way to teach ourselves how not to repeat them. In other words, feelings of regret can prompt us to reflect upon our choices of words and deeds and to learn how to do otherwise in the future. To learn from our mistakes.

Regret can accompany our moral consciousness. When we violate our own values, or those of people whose regard matters to us, our regret can help us face up to ourselves and take responsibility for the consequences of our actions, intended or u nintended. It can motivate us to take care of unfinished business. One Thanksgiving more than thirteen years ago, I went to watch the Thanksgiving Parade in New York City and when it was over we went to eat in the Eclair on 72 Street. Notice that I remember the name and location in detail. I have some unfinished business here. Anyway, Matthew was about ten years old at the time. We ate in the crowded restaurant and I stood in line to pay the bill. I waited and waited as we inched forward to the cash register. Just when It was my turn, another cashier opened a new register and I stepped over to pay the check there. He waved me back to the original line, but when I tried to reclaim my place, the person behind me put up a fuss and accused me of cutting the line. Angry at the restaurant for making us wait so long then teasing me with the hint of another line, I walked out of the restaurant without paying the bill at all. Matthew hurried after me, anxiously looking behind us for the manager, or the police, to come and arrest me. His reaction of “Mom, how could you do that? Won’t we get in trouble?” pricked my conscience because I knew that I had not only behaved in a manner that violated my own ethics, but I had done it in front of my child. I stole from that restaurant. And I regret both that and the example I set for my son. I have carried that regret for many years and only now have I figured out what to do. I can see if the Eclair is still in business and, if so, send them a check to pay for our meals. If they no longer exist, I can send a check to a local food pantry in memory of that ill-fated breakfast. Our conscience speaks to us in the language of regret.

Besides originating out of the need, or the desire, to learn from our mistakes and besides originating out of a commitment to live ethically, regret arises from other sources within us, sources that can lead us to dead-ends, or even unhealthy places. What are the sources of our regret? Why do we want the past to have been different?

Many of us have a place within that I call the land of “should.” It contains all of our rules and expectations, our parents’ instructions, our teachers’ injunctions. All of the ways life “should” be. All of the ways we “should” be. These are neither ethical “shoulds” nor rules for safety or health. Rather they are customs, preferences, the way things are. This place within us can lie dormant for long periods of time, but we become very aware of its existence each time we violate a “should.” Then we enter the land of “should,” and regret often follows. My mother always told me the house must be neat and things put away when company comes. I do enjoy neatness, but I also tend to create little places of peace with candles and incense and other beautiful things. Come to my office and you will see the table with Jane Van de Bogart’s frog candlesticks, Peter Muste’s photo of a Buddha from Thailand, a glass tile of a chalice made especially for me, and the like. One day a reporter came there for an interview and wrote that we met in my “cluttered but cozy” office I really didn’t like that. I looked around my office and asked myself whether I should get rid of that table. You see, I crossed the line of the uncluttered neatness rule and a pang of regret came over me. I felt embarrassed; I felt defensive about the implied (to me) criticism; I felt rebellious and defiant. All because I internalized what someone told me was the way my rooms should look and I bought into it. Usually we stop with the sense of regret, all the while maybe feeling like a jerk. But if we can peek underneath our emotions, we might find that our regrets tell us about our internal, unexamined rules and they give us an opportunity to question them. They give us the freedom to ask ourselves whether we find it helpful and healthful to live with so many “shoulds.” Do we need them all?

Many of us carry around a deep dread that something in us is not quite right, not okay and that one day everybody’s going to find out. We compare ourselves to others and find ourselves lacking. We feel a little uneasy and less than confident about our talents, our intelligence, our families, what we have achieved in life. About who we are fundamentally. We fear that if people really knew us, they would see us for frauds. In our desire and need to be thought well of, to call forth our best selves, to please others, to get ahead, whatever that means to us, we become our own worst enemies. It’s a coping mechanism that doesn’t really help us cope. We try to make ourselves better by scrutinizing everything we say and do. Some of us criticize ourselves far more than we praise ourselves and we have a loud, critical judge within who lets us know everything we do “wrong.” We develop a habit of second guessing ourselves, in the name of improving ourselves. In the name of protecting ourselves from the anticipated scorn of others. We lie awake going over events of the day. “Why did I say I enjoyed that film? Why did I say I watch television? Now everybody thinks I’m an idiot.” “Why did I eat so much? Why didn’t I leave more of a tip?” It goes on and on relentlessly.

Regret emerges out of such painful, ongoing critical self-judgment. We want the past to be different because we want ourselves to be different and we blame ourselves when we’re not. We lose the distinction between reflective self-improvement and beating ourselves up. Maybe we feel angry at the way things are, at the way we are. Maybe we feel anxious. Maybe we feel confused. The overly harsh s elf-critical habit spills over into our relationships with others. All the regrets it brings in its wake take on a life of their own. Regret becomes a way of avoiding ourselves. We didn’t do it “right,” we won’t ever get it “right,” why bother. We become stuck in a black hole of regret. That’s a very painful place.

Regrets can harm us and keep us stuck. Regrets can help us find ways to move on. Our work is to uncover the sources of our regret. Have we done something at odds with our ethical values and our conscience speaks up? Have we made a mistake and, unintentionally, contributed to the suffering of ourselves and/or someone else? Has our habitually critical, judging voice used its loud speaker again? Have we entered the land of “should?” What is the source of our regret?

If we can tease out the source, we can know what to do with the regret we feel. We can glean when to let it go as an unexamined and no longer useful expectation of how things should be. We can understand it as a mirror reflecting back to us our fear and shame and use it perhaps to deal with those issues. We can learn from it. We can build our courage and use it as an opportunity to strengthen ethically.

Our lives come filled with choices to make. Looking at the past and asking ourselves “what if” may indeed help us to make sense of paths we took. But wanting the past to be different is like a dog chasing its tail. We can’t change the past. We can, however, acceot that it happened and use it to change ourselves in the present.

Be strong then, and enter into your own body;


there you have a solid place for your feet.


Think about it carefully!


Don’t go off somewhere else!


Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of imaginary things,


and stand firm in that which you are.  

May it be so.