Relishing My Regrets

This is something that has bugged me for a while now; something I've never been able to relate to. I realize that everybody is different, that nobody walks away from situations having learned the same lesson, and everybody handles things of all extremes in their own way. But it seems that there is an increasingly common slant through which people reflect on their lives, that being the oh-so-trite prosaism, "I have no regrets."

I'm not so antipathetic that I can't see where these people are coming from. They most likely think that by banning the acknowledgment of any regretful sentiment from their retrospection - or at least of that in which they will admit - they are convincing the world and themselves that they have gone through no trial, hardship, or mistake in vain. That's admirable, yes. But you can take something from a situation and still have regrets at the same time. Can anybody really look back on their entire life, every event from the most miniscule to monumental, and not see one thing that they even half way wish they'd done differently? I can't even imagine what it must be like to live so righteously. Please, someday do write a book on your err-free life, so that those of us who are admittedly human can learn from your pansophy.

Or maybe it's that saying 'I have no regrets' is a convenient cop-out of having to actually direct mental energy towards something less than ideal in one's past. In my personal opinion (one that by no means do I expect others to see eye to eye with), life is all about mistakes. It's all very "I never promised you a rose garden."

I respect the philosophy that a person can and will learn something from every situation; that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger; that we may fall five times, but we get back up six. Therefore, in order to learn something from any event, you have to have been tested in some manner, however large or small. And to be tested means that this time, things didn't 100% go the way you'd expected, or the way you were ready for. It's kind of like a catch-22... or an example of that cliche 'bittersweet' flavor life has sometimes.