A Life without Regrets

Choosing the lens you look at life through

Do you have regrets?

Regret is an interesting thing.

Regret is a feeling of sadness, disappointment, or remorse about something that has happened or something that you have done. It is often accompanied by a sense of wishing that the situation had turned out differently and a desire to change the past.

Not so long ago I got into a conversation with a friend about regret. And it became clear that regret is not something I choose to believe in but that it’s something that lives as a deep seeded fear when one chooses to look at life a certain way. The conversation went something like this…

If you don’t have kids you’ll regret it and why would you want to live with that regret.

To that I answered that I don’t believe in regret because I believe we’re having the experiences that we’re supposed to. I trust in what life brings and I trust that the choices I make are the ones I need to make in that moment. Even when I seemingly make a “wrong” choice, it leads me to where I was always supposed to go. If my choice and body lead me to having children one day great, but with my current awareness I’m not interested in having that experience right now. My answer seemed incomprehensible to him - it just did not make sense. And I get that. We’re not taught to live that way. We’re taught to live with our heads in the clouds dreaming of what could be or looking back at the past at what should have been. Trusting yourself in the moment is rather radical. Trusting that your body is leading you on your right path even more so.

He pressed with the experience of others he knew - women who woke up at 40 or 45, who weren’t able to have kids once they wanted them and were filled with deep regret. Their lives filled with sadness.

And even that doesn’t scare me. I trust my ability to be okay with whatever my life has planned. And if that is being very not okay about a choice I’ve made previously I trust my ability to sit with that too because what ever the experience is, I was supposed to have it to grow my awareness of life. If I wake up with a desire for children later in my life and I’m unable to have them, I will know that was my path. To grieve what can’t be and to let that change me, shift me and lead me to where I’m supposed to be instead.

I think regret is where we turn as humans in order to hold onto the idea that we have control over our timelines and our lives. In Human Design there is a concept called no choice. It basically says that when we move as ourselves (and even when we “don’t”) every choice we make is always leading us to the next fork in the road, the next small choice and on and on we go moving through the lives we were always going to lead. It reasons that even when we make a choice from the mind or as our not self, it is still correct because it is inevitably leading us to the next opportunity, person, system or place that our being needs for it’s evolution. We can’t get it wrong because even when we get ourselves into situations that seem less than perfect to our mind, it provides a point to wake us up. To become aware of what’s not working or what feels off and to make new choices along a different path. We can’t look back and wish away one of those choice points (because as we know from every sci-fi time travel movie - changing just one tiny moment could change our entire existence).

Regret feels deeply linked to the inability to accept the current moment and to accept reality as it is. I was reading Alan Watt’s The Book: A taboo against knowing yourself last night (for the second, maybe third time). And this passage stood out…

“The individual is taught to live and work for some future in which the impossible will at last happen, if not for him, then at least for his children. We are thus breeding a type of human being incapable of living in the present - that is, of really living. For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. (And when the future is a hoax, the past becomes a regret) There is no point in making plans for the future which you will never get to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living in some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, ‘Now I’ve arrived!’”

Living a life this way feels like living a life in a way to outrun feeling disappointed or uncomfortable with reality. It’s as if our future orientation keeps us trying to outrun regret. And once our “future” catches up with us we open ourselves up to regret that things weren’t done differently. Instead of living in a middle realm - where we are able to accept the current reality, grieve the things from our past that we need to in order to efficiently let the associated emotions out of the body while loosely holding the future in sight through a state of curiosity.

Regret holds a grip onto the idea that you could have done things differently, when actually, you are always making the best choices you can for your current awareness. We can’t choose and move beyond our present awareness. Regret seems to be a retrospective lens to look at the past through your now awareness. The awareness that has evolved and grown through the very choices that you’ve made in the past. Without those choices, the evolution in your perspective wouldn’t have happened.

I think of the path we’ve taken for the last 2 years in order to make our move happen. In another world, perhaps I would regret buying a block of just forest in the height of the market (with no access). But in reality, without that snap purchase we don’t put our house on the market when we did. And we perhaps don’t sell our house in a good market. We don’t begin to take real steps towards a move. In another world, perhaps I would regret upgrading our tiny house to one that’s made it unfeasible to continue with our plans of taking it down to TAS. But in reality, without that upgrade we don’t continue looking at property and find the cottage we’ve purchased. By doing that we moved one of our dreams from being maybe 5 years away to being within reach now. Without the decisions that might seem “wrong” on the outside my reality isn’t what it is now. I can’t remove any of those choices from my history without changing where I am now. Maybe without that original choice I don’t sell the cafe when I did. We don’t take action on actually leaving an environment that isn’t for me anymore - we stay comfortable in the life we were living that wasn’t aligned anymore. And sure I can look back now and say I know this, this and this about buying property in Tas or about tiny house regulations but I don’t know those things without those exact experiences. My awareness needed to make those choices on it’s path.

Hanging too dearly to a sense of regret and wishing something could have been done differently severely damages our ability to trust in our choices. When we think we made the wrong choices, we doubt our ability to make good choices in the future. We freeze ourselves in a state of inaction because the fear of making a mistake is too great. When you begin to look at life in a way that switches the word mistake to lesson or learning we help to ease this freeze. It’s the lesson of the 3rd line (and baby 6th line) in Human Design. Some people (and to an extent everyone of course) are here to learn from their mistakes. Everyone is here to get it “wrong” a few times because without the ability to move through those moments we lose the ability to evolve and grow. We stunt our own experience of life and we end up with “regret” because of the way we see things, not because regret is a universal occurrence in ones life.

As we get closer to moving I’m getting asked a lot if I’m scared. You must really be feeling it now, change is scary. I feel things in my body but fear isn’t one of them because I have no fear that I’m making the “wrong” decision. Grief of leaving loved ones, yes. Nostalgia, sure. Nervousness and anticipation, absolutely. But fear that what we’re doing could possibly be the wrong decision. Nope. Fear of newness and change. Nope.

6 days and counting

So, do you have regrets? If you do, I wonder if you would find the thing they taught you? How did they evolve your ability be with your emotions? How did they change the perspective you see things through? What knowledge did you gain? How did they change the way you interact with others? What sensations did they pin point in the body as warning signs? Can the sadness attached to them be alchemised and felt as grief and released from the body? Can you trust that at every point you’re making the next right decision?

Thank you for musing with me x

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