No Regrets?

So, I’m trying my hand at writing a book. The story draws heavily from my life experiences, forcing me to think a lot about my past. This week my mind was on my separation from my first wife. Particularly, the day that I came to visit my son after having moved out a few days before. He was a year and a half old and it was the first time that I ever saw him looking sad.

His mom explained that he had gone from room to room repeating, “Where you daddy? Where you daddy?”. The image broke my heart in a million pieces. He is sixteen years old now and a lump still forms in my throat every time I think about it. How could I have done that to that little boy? In those dark days, my only tearful prayers were, “Lord, pleeeaase let him know how much I love him.”

I have often heard people say that they have no regrets. I’ve always wondered what they mean because I definitely have regrets. I regret what my son had to go through. If I had a do-over I probably would have made the same decision from that point but there are many earlier things that I would have done differently if I knew then what I know now (getting married at twenty-three for starters). But the thing is, I can’t change the past so what can I do?

I don’t know where I heard it, but someone once said that your approach to the past should be like driving a car. You need to look in your rear-view mirror (the past) regularly. It helps you to learn from mistakes, to get perspective, to notice trends in your behaviour but you can’t drive with your eyes glued to the rear-view mirror. The much bigger focus is the view of the present and the future through the windscreen in front of you.

If I had let my mistakes dominate my thoughts (kept my eyes glued to the rear-view mirror) I would certainly have sunk into depression (crashed). But the thing is, had I done that, I would have missed the thousands of happy memories I created with my son since then. Moments like this one:

The car of life doesn’t stop moving, and if you are not looking at where you are going then you will crash. If I kept my eyes on the past, I would have lost every opportunity to create a successful future.

To successfully navigate life, you have to respond to things as they come at you; change direction, change gears, mash brakes, accelerate. The past quickly becomes irrelevant except as a learning opportunity. The same is true of past successes by the way. Many times, we can be crashing even as our eyes are glued to the glory days that once were.

For me that image of my son searching for his daddy still weighs heavy but when self-condemnation tries to take root I wrest my eyes off the past and look up. I remind myself that where there is Life, there is hope and that while I’m looking back, opportunities to create a different past are slipping by every second.

I don’t know if there is anybody else with regrets like me but if there are people out there who have made mistakes I want to encourage you not to focus on that rear-view mirror too much. Look up, there just might be joy up ahead.

Joyfully,

Copyright 2017, Matik Nicholls