I’m not sure how to start this essay off. I’ve been throwing draft sentences at the wall for ten minutes and nothing’s sticking; but I know if I don’t start now I’ll watch Netflix or something and decide it was too silly to write. I’m just going to start saying things, and hope it all comes together.
I said goodbye to a friend yesterday. Not a final goodbye, but she’s leaving the country, so I won’t see her in person for months (maybe a year, though I hope it won’t come to that.)
We don’t catch up that often anyway, but it’s the kind of friendship where you could not talk for a year or a month or a decade and still be on the same page as before. We understand each other quite well, I think, and have helped each other through some bad moments.
This friend, call her Olivia, has had a pretty rough couple of years, on account of a long-term partner who hasn’t treated her like a princess, exactly, or even like a beaten-up mop handle. She’s coping better than I would, but she’ll be better with time and some distance.
We talked about our end-of-year regrets a bit. We both wish we’d done more things, of the things-you-do-in-your-twenties variety. Oxford terms are overwhelming and cramped, but there’s always free time if you plan some.
Then she added she hopes she won’t look back on this chapter of her life and see it as a waste—built entirely, as it was, around a person who wasn’t right for her.
I try not to give advice to people on principle, since the people with lots of advice are nearly always the least qualified to give it. But I’d done an all-nighter the night before and for some reason the sleeplessness gave me at least the illusion of perspicacity. I told her that in a decade, when she was married with kids of her own, she’d look at her family—a particular man and particular kids, whom she loved to the tips of their toes—and know that if a butterfly had flapped its wings differently, a car hand moved slightly slower, or these years panned out differently and she’d been with a kinder man, she’d never have known them at all.
It was the end of an era for her, in a way, but on the walk back from Pret the weather wasn’t wanting to celebrate. “Pathetic fallacy”, she noted, sheltering me with her umbrella.
I told her the rain isn’t bad, or unfortunate. It’s just silly. Drawing on the ‘How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin’ module from my Theology degree, I explained how rain is the product of angels taking a desperate and well-earned leak; today’s showers came from a group of them, side-by-side at the urinals, exclaiming ‘Ohhhhhh yeah’ in thick, Australian accents.
It’s a little gross, but we can’t blame them for it. We don’t want them holding on forever.
There’s something here about framing. Having to view two, formative years—730 days, 17,520 hours, 1,051,200 minutes—as a mistake worth blotting out is psychologically corrosive. Framing your past that way helps no one; nor is the framing true.
In one sense, it’s good to regret your mistakes. But you can still be glad you made them.
Hey. That thing you just said about angels and rain. Please don’t say that ever again. Thanks.
I’m inclined to consider regrets of this sort to be incoherent, rather than misguided.
A sketch:
let’s first separate passing regrets from substantive regrets. I might regret not taking an umbrella this morning when I end up caught in rain. But that’s not what you’re talking about, I take it. I take regret in the sense that you mean here to be substantive.
Regrets also necessarily stand out to oneself in some way.
Taken together, regrets as (1) non-trivial and (2) existentially conspicuous, such phenomenon are just the sorts of things that one can’t cleanly distinguish from the natural flow of one’s general form of life.
So for example: I regret not grabbing that umbrella this morning makes sense in a direct way; Olivia regretting staying with this jackass for a given period of time only makes sense if we (a) consider this time a collection of discrete events not in some way greater than the sum of their parts and (b) excuse or abstract away any number of self-attributes that caused her to behave in the way that she did over a substantial period of time - let’s call them X. Imagine living in Seattle, and listening to your coworker “regret forgetting to grab the umbrella” every single morning 37 times in a row during rainy season. You’d be justifiably ready to slap him by the second week. But this is not at all how we react toward others caught in a mode of a more substantive regret. In fact, we behave in the opposite way - with compassion and care, sometimes bordering on enabling. Why?
I think we sense that criticism of such behavior cuts too close to the bone, in a sense. After a certain point, we can’t separate the behavior from the person’s identity, and the attribution of responsibility gets murky.
Taken to an extreme, it sounds almost vulgar: Olivia was with this person because she should have been - her X-ness simply made so. (Aside - isn’t it curious how the totalizing, latently tragic power of regret hinges on its abductive certainty?)
And so what does regret on this level even mean? I’m inclined to believe that regrets of this sort are at best incoherent (attribute-wise) and at worst a sort of denial-of-self (holistically).
As such, regret gets in the way of figuring out whatever X is and dissolving it from within, given one’s will, propensity, etc.