John and I were talking about regrets this morning and I clearly have many more than he does. Never someone to sit around waiting for change, I have often jumped at opportunities when perhaps I should have waited, but I have always been more afraid of missing something than making a wrong decision.
Ralph Waldo Emerson might have been speaking to me when he said. ” For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.”
I’ve heard people say and have said it myself, that everything that has happened in our lives makes us who we are now, but sometimes I still wonder what might have been different had I been more content to wait for the light of a new day to reach me instead of always trying to find my way out of the dark on my own.
There is something to be gained in patience, a virtue I have long needed to learn.
Gifts Of The Journey 
This resonates with me very much. I am not a very patient person either, and as I revisit a physical location from my past of 19 years ago, I find myself occasionally wondering “what if”…I remember very clearly the forks in the road of my past…but I love my life now, so I have to figure that I took the best turns for me.
Oh boy! I am the most impetuous leap before you look-er there is. I know just where you are coming from.
I am going to use that Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, I love it.
I firmly believe that people and events come into our lives for a reason. Sometimes that reason I want to ignore, but nonetheless they come. But what I’ve learned from it all is that the character it builds as we journey makes the leaps a little less scary and light the way for new dreams to be discovered. On another note being in the dark can be scary, but it can also heighten our other senses and allow us to think more clearly before stepping into the light.
Best wishes……Jennik
I understand the idea of regrets well, and yet as much as I’d like to change things in the past, I can make those changes in the present and hope to do better this time….
Here’s one way to think of it, if you’d change anything in your past, you might not now be happily married to John. Given that perspective, I hope you realize that everything, the good and the bad, has all brought you to this very happy place.
I like the wisdom of your commenters! I don’t have any regrets in my life so far. Maybe I’m lucky or maybe just a bit young? There is still much of my life path to be travelled and hopefully I will live to rejoice the choices I am making and not regret them….
I feel I am often the opposite. When in doubt I tend to hang on white knuckled where I am. At times in my life I’ve felt that not only have events happened to me that force me to change, but the process of change would not have been nearly as hard, had I embraced it earlier. I feel I would be a better person if I’d had the courage to learn to live better with the ambiguity, uncertainty and fear that is a part of all our lives, and at much earlier age. How much of that is 20-20 hindsight, I don’t know. I do know that the feeling of regret is a powerful force for change at least for me, and so maybe over the course of my life, it will all even out.
Loads of material of more posts in here, Elizabeth!
Hi Elizabeth,
There’s no way to know what might be a regretful decision before you make it; you just have to trust that it’s the right decision for you at that time. Later, looking back on your life, you’ll connect the dots and see that all of your decisions (good and bad) lead you to this place of awareness and enabled you to be an inspiration to others.
Can you imagine how insufferable we’d all be if we didn’t make mistakes?