No Regrets

Living your life with regrets is like driving a car looking in the rearview mirror.

You may have good intentions, think positive thoughts and envision a better future but the “aim” of your actions will be determined by your view.

It is all the could have, should have, regrets that are guiding your course, not the I am and I will.

We all have made mistakes, we all are making mistake and we will continue to make mistakes no matter how hard we try to avoid it.

Life is a continuous learning process and just when you think you have figured it out it will throw a new challenge at you. So don’t sleep on your laurels and don’t expect boredom in your future.

As long as you live life is a constant challenge.

But that is not a problem. I love challenges and I don’t understand the people that go out of their way to avoid them, to do nothing.

I don’t agree either with the people that work all the time and never stop to smell the roses.

I mean after hard work and struggle everybody deserves a vacation.

I also believe that the only bad experiences are the experiences from which we have learned nothing.

And that seems to be the big problem; we keep on making the same mistakes again and again.

These bad experiences accumulate in our mind, in our memory, as negative luggage as regrets and after a while, these regrets will drag us down.

So from time to time it is necessary to go through this negative burden and throw it out of our mind any regrets we may have.

You should live your life with no regrets.

Whatever you have done you have done. The past cannot be changed no matter what you do.

The only thing in your control is our present and in how we handle this present is the secret of our future. So stop driving your life looking in the rearview mirror. It is just a recipe for more accidents to come.

There is an interesting study done by the phycology department at Cornel University.

The researchers have looked at videos of Olympic medal ceremonies and compare the way the winners reacted.

You would expect the happiness to be tied to the value of the medal but your assumption would be wrong.

Of course, the gold medal winner will be happy but to everybody’s surprise, it was the bronze medal winner that was most excited and the silver medal winner that was the list excited. Why is that?

We look at ourselves by comparing us with the other people around.

The bronze medal winner is looking down. One second less one small difference and he could have not been an Olympic medalist.

The silver m medalist, however, is looking up. He is thinking one second, one minute difference and  I could have been the gold medal winner.

It is the regrets that take all the joy out of our experiences.

We torture ourselves with “I should have” and “I could have” while keeping the same mistakes again.

I remember an incident in my high school years.

We were having a dance ball.  It was an annual tradition for our school to invite the neighbor high school which happened to be a girls-only high school.

Needless to say that all the boys in my school were looking forward to this dace.

I can still see us, the boys, aligned on one side of the ballroom and all the pretty girls aligned on the opposite side.

The music started and with the exception of a few boyfriend-girlfriend couples, nobody was brave enough to invite the girls to dance.

I started making fun of all my colleagues. I was the unofficial class jocker and it was my duty to ridicule them.

I was having fun calling them names until one of them fired back. “If you are so smart and brave why don’t you do it?

I realized there was no way out so I did the best I could think of.

I said I’ll go and ask a girl to dance but no matter what happened they all had to go and ask one girl to dance. They also had no choice but to accept the challenge but to make it even harder for me they asked to pick the girl I have to invite.

So they picked out what they thought was the most beautiful girl guaranteed to refuse me and shut me down.

Here I was walking to a certain defeat and humiliation but determined to do it just to take them down with me.

I reach the girl and blurred out the prepared invitation and to my shock, she said yes!

So here I was slow dancing with the most beautiful girl in the room looking at my friends looking at me from the side. Life couldn’t have been more wonderful.

So I learn a very important lesson that evening: It is better to regret making a decision than to regret never making that decision.

It was a very good lesson and it served me well in all my youth and young adulthood but somehow somewhere I lost it.

I became fearful of the future or just too complacent, too lazy. I got stuck into a dead end job and inevitably found myself on an unemployment line.

I let regrets taking over my emotional life and pretty soon worries and negativity joined in to take me down to the deepest darkness of depression.

Do not let regrets of the past determine your future.

If you have any regrets write them down. Look at the list and for each regret write next to it the lesson you have learned. Post that list on a visible spot on your desk or where it would be impossible not to see it every day.

At the top of the list write in bold capital letters:

I WILL LIVE MY LIFE WITH NO REGRETS