Charlie Brown – Regrets published 6th May 1960
Today has seen more pieces click into place. Sometimes clarity strikes all in one go. After trying to force enlightenment for ages in a flash of lightening the fog lifts. When you do find yourself, your passion, your inner abilities it’s as if the Universe says ‘great! Now she knows who she is & what she wants we can send it in’. Talking with my lovely friend Jan, the creative force behind our collaborations for Ostrich Angels, the lightening hit. More than once. I finally understood what I’m going to be doing for the next while. As we chatted it occurred to me to think about my journey to this point. Do I have any regrets?
Of course there are always times when we might wish to have done something differently. Or wished for another outcome to our actions. The choices we made could have brought us along a rocky road. Or put limitations around us. We might even have denied ourselves and our abilities as a result of not seeing clearly. But do we have to regret these choices? In the words of one famous song “Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again too few to mention”. Challenging times tend to make us stronger people. Being able to remind myself that I’m resilient and can survive the unexpected outcomes of my choices is a positive way of viewing decisions that ended up taking me on a more complicated life journey.
Having said that, I do feel that it is tempting to hold onto regrets. It’s a good way to explain why life is less rosy, less like we expected or wanted. Telling myself that I haven’t got the life I imagined because … is a way of sidestepping my life now. The danger of regrets is that we can start to use them to disempower ourselves. If we keep looking backwards at the past and saying ‘if only’ we nibble away at our trust in ourselves. Decision-making becomes bogged down in procrastination. Eventually we end up in a fog of confusion. That is when we need the blast of clarity. Our experiences have made us who we now are. They have also brought us to this point with plenty of options about how we move forward in our lives. Pulling out the regrets and recognising that those decisions were from a different person, in a different time, facing other circumstances we can use them as a springboard in to making clearer choices so we avoid the patterns of past choices. They are the prompts that are guiding us into the future. Then we can let them go. They have served their purpose.
Is it time for you to get more clarity or confidence in your life’s purpose? Do your regrets hang around like a bad smell? Have you, like Charlie Brown, amassed an award-winning collection of regrets? Time to use them to kickstart a different life for yourself!
Day 205 of my blogging challenge. Picture courtesy of a Facebook post by the Charle M Schulz Museum.