(8) Regret

The ultimate is to be able to say you don’t regret a thing. I think that’s fucked. It’s like this phoney standard. It’s like taking the standards of a rock star and applying them to your little life as an office clerk. Doesn’t work.

Besides, who’s asking you? If you don’t regret anything it means you haven’t lived, haven’t learned anything. Or you spent your life in a cave on Mars? If you don’t regret anything it means you set some standard out of thin air and then decided you passed it with flying colours.Pin that medal on if you want. People who say they never regret anything usually have done horrible things and, racing to the grave like the rest of us, rationalized it away. Or they are lying. I don’t regret my five divorces, my syphilis or starting World War III. Wow, big man.

We’re talking about the same kind of asshole mechanism as “I never apologize.”Fine, a lot of apologies are not meant. You bump someone with your briefcase in an elevator and you say sorry. Just a little convention of politeness, there’s no sorrow there. Pretty sad when everyone is so narcissistic, self absorbed, enthralled by economics, so speciated that we don’t understand each other except through gut wrenching confessions or ego-maniacal monologues.

What kind of asshole cuts themselves out of a mechanism that is designed to reduce conflict, or the bad effects thereof, in a world so burdened by it? Don’t we understand this even from the point of selfish self interest?

Grow up. Learn to apologize, pay attention to what you are doing, to the world around you. This might mean embracing your sorrow, but if you don’t, well, ...you’ll regret it.

copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009