There are many quotes that speak to regrets over something we did, but far more often, our regrets are about what we didn’t do. We can get pretty caught up looking back and ruminating on how our choices would be different now, but is it helpful? How does regret serve us? What’s done is done, and we can’t change it, so why even worry about it?
Good questions. Too bad I don’t have the answers, but I did ask my friends to see if I was the only one still thinking about “the undone of the past.” Turns out, I’m not. In no particular order, here are a few verses of the “coulda shoulda woulda” chorus that I’m sure we’ve all sung.
The Retail Moments: Money can’t buy happiness, but don’t we all have one item we wish we’d bought? On a trip to Ireland, I toured the Waterford factory, and like any good tour, it ended in a gift shop. One of their most popular items is a bowl that contains every cut, technique, and pattern that a Waterford master glass cutter would have to know. The bowl was expensive to start with, and then when I realized the price did not include shipping and import duties it just wasn’t an option. Sadly, not long after I visited, the Waterford company was sold and reorganized, and now the crystal is not made in Ireland. While it would have impacted my budget back then for a few months, the bowls are now rare and absent a lottery ticket, I’m never having one. Fiscal responsibility is admirable, but I wish I’d splashed out a little; it would have been worth it.
Geographical Choices: A few of my friends mentioned they wished they had moved out of an area sooner; others wished they’d stayed longer in a place, rather than moving elsewhere. It’s easy to say, “Bloom where you’re planted,” but the problem is that we aren’t plants. If you put a rosebush in your yard, it’s not going to decide to dig itself up and go over to your neighbor’s yard. I can’t say that I regret moving three states away after my father died, but I do wish the timing had been better, and I’d tried harder to see if there were other options.
Relationships: Beginning and ending them can be a process fraught with peril. Everyone I know who has relationship regrets has them because of actions they did not take and the thoughts and feelings they did not express. They aren’t all Hallmark moments, like “hug your friends; you never know if it’s your last chance.” One funny friend told me, “I try not to regret anything, but honestly, I should have told ‘John’ to hit the bricks sometime in the first five minutes of meeting him; it should never have taken two years.”
Children: Regrets are never about just ourselves. They almost always involve other people; children are a significant source of the shoulda, coulda, woulda scenario. Should I have had them? Could I have stopped at just the first two? Would a fourth have been a good idea? The problem is that we can never know what might have been. Do I regret telling Santa that bringing my kid six cans of Silly String with his Spiderman web shooting glove was fine? Yes, a thousand times yes. Could I have gone to the mat with the school system sooner when there were issues with meeting my kids’ needs? Also yes. I won’t ever regret the children themselves, but I hope what I left out or did poorly won’t be a huge problem.
We won’t ever be able to fully rid ourselves of the coulda shoulda woulda chorus that lives in our heads like an earworm we can’t stop hearing, but for me, it was helpful to know I’m not the only one hearing it. The lesson is that sometimes, it’s okay to go to places people say we couldn’t, to buy something we really shouldn’t, and to have adventures others wouldn’t. None of us leave this life without regretting a few choices, but I’m with Lucy — I’d rather regret an action than always wonder what it might have been like to do some of what I passed up.
Brenda Kelley Kim has lived in Marblehead for 50 years and is an author, freelance writer, and mother of three. Her column appears weekly.
