The toxicity of regret

I just finished reading “the midnight library” by Matt Haig. It was hard to get through the first few chapters as the story revolves around the life of Nora Seed who lives in a downward spiral toward her decision to commit suicide. It is a tough bit to read especially if you have been living through depression, like I did, and you’re confronted with thoughts and feelings once occupying your own mind.

What I got as a general idea from the book is that it is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. It’s easy to wish we’d developed other talents or welcomed different opportunities. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to the USA, accepted a job or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives would be happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on. The NOW AND HERE is what counts!

It is important to focus on what we have and what we have is the result of each action we have undertaken and each decision we made. Nothing of what we are, what we have and what we do would have occurred in case we had taken different life paths.

Moreover, the past can not be changed and regret therefore doesn’t serve us if we want to make changes to the life that doesn’t satisfy us. We only can look forward, ponder our situation and make changes for a better future.

Concluding, regret is not helpful. Negative experiences and defining them as such help us to change direction on the next occasion. It is all a learning curve and my experience tells me that wallowing in regret is toxic and useless.

What are you thoughts about this? I’d love to know!