Whatever the proportions, some regretters feel sadness but resist feeling anger others acknowledge outrage but not sorrow.
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Damn cruel fate!”) or enormous anger with a side of sadness (“Why, why, why did I get a haircut from a stylist who was actively smoking a bong?”). Your particular situation may involve enormous sadness and a little anger (“My father died before I ever met him. Of the four basic emotions-sad, mad, glad, and scared-regret is a mixture of the first two. If you’d rather be happy, prune the “shouldn’t haves” from your mental story, and move on to… If you enjoy being miserable, by all means, continue to rail against this fact. That thing you regret? It really, really, really shouldn’t have happened. If you’re prone to unproductive regret, please hear this: Everyone agrees with you. People use it to avoid scary or difficult action instead of telling the story of the past in a useful way, they use it as their excuse for staying wretched. Even drearier are the sad ones, who forever drone some version of “If only.” If only they’d married Sebastian, or gotten that promotion, or heeded the label’s advice not to operate heavy machinery, they would be happy campers instead of les misérables. Many people pour years of energy into useless “shouldn’t haves.” The angry ones endlessly repeat that their ex-spouses shouldn’t have left them, their parents shouldn’t have overfed them, or their bosses shouldn’t have made them wear uncomfortable chipmunk costumes in 90-degree heat. Try these steps, more or less in order.Īs long as you’re thinking, “That shouldn’t have happened or I shouldn’t have done that,” you’re locked in a struggle against reality. You can act now to transform the way you tell the story of your past, ultimately making it a stalwart protector of your future. The past doesn’t exist except as a memory, a mental story, and though past events aren’t changeable, your stories about them are. If you think that can’t be done, think again. Both can be transformed by what you decide to do right now, in this moment. There are at least two time zones where you can choose to make regret’s powerful energy healing rather than destructive: the past and the future. Regret can be your worst enemy or your best friend. You get to decide, however, whether your toughness will look like unreachable bitterness or unstoppable resilience your tenderness the raw vulnerability of a never-healing wound, or a kindness so deep it heals every wound it touches. It’s a difficult companion, prone to accusatory comments and dark moods, and it changes you, leaving you both tougher and more tender. If you’ve ever made a bad decision or suffered an accident, regret has been your roommate, if not your conjoined twin. The forehead-slap of hindsight, the woeful fuel of country ballads, the self-recrimination I feel for eating a quart of pudding in a crafty but unsuccessful attempt to avoid writing this column. Days later, the other monks found him in the cellar, weeping over a crumbling manuscript and moaning, “It says ‘celebrate,’ not ‘celibate!'”Īh, regret. Realizing that for centuries his order had been making copies of copies, he decided to examine some of the monastery’s original documents.
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So here’s the story: After a lifetime of hand-copying ancient texts, an elderly monk became abbot of his monastery.