Regret Less

On Facebook I recently looked at photos of an old friend. This isn't exactly normal for me because the only thing I use Facebook is for contacting people; browsing my newsfeed and looking at people's status updates and posts are not something I do on a regular basis.

On this fateful night, one status update particularly caught my eye. It wasn't the content of the status update, it was getting x amount of likes to do y, it was the person who posted it. I hadn't talked to this person in a long time, hell I think the last time we talked he called me on accident. But we used to be best friends throughout middle school and the first year of high school and reminiscing got the better of me so I clicked on his profile and saw what his wall had to offer.

Now I looked down a little bit and I saw... well to be blunt things I didn't exactly approve of; I distanced myself from my "close" high school friends when I saw them getting involved in similar things. I will admit I judged him a little bit, which is of course my bad, and I was disappointed in him. This disappointment might be unwarranted, but the time that I knew him I thought that he was... above things like that. I'm probably making it sound like a huge deal but what I was typical college stuff so I wasn't very surprised either.

After I worked through that I thought about the dangerous "what if" questions. He moved at the end of freshman year and I kept scattered contact with him; due to my dad's work in the summer I was actually able to visit him and he came back during the sophomore summer during July 4th. I wondered... what it would have been like if I kept closer contact with him. Would we still be friends? Would I be talking with him right now about my life and playing games with him? Would he have come back to California?

Inevitably these thoughts led to my past, which in turn led to regret. The thoughts of regret made me think about living a life without regrets. Yea, that's a very cliche line but pretty much everyone wants to live a life regrets right? But what does that look like?

The first thing I think about when I hear "live a life without regrets" is the phrase "carpie diem" - seize the day. Which, in turn makes me think about two things: "Dead Poets Society" and a particular episode of Community. I don't actually how the phrase was used in the former but the way Community portrays use of seizing the day is interesting and, at least to me, is a little thought provoking.

In Community the professor for the class tells the main character Jeff that if he does not seize the day he will receive an F in the class. Throughout the episode Jeff attempts to seize the day by doing ridiculous things that he perceives as seizing the day; he flies a kite across campus and after wards plays hopscotch with random teenage girls as a way to show him seizing the day. The episode makes it clear that what Jeff and his professor do is seizing the day. The episode essentially says that doing whatever you want in the moment is seizing the day or in other words, living a life without regret.


Is that what living a life without regret looks like?


Simply doing whatever you want in the moment and not caring about the consequences because at the end of the day you can say that you were happy?


Looking at life through that lens would make mine, and most people's day a particularly depressing one. Today I woke up at 1PM played video games and studied and read various things on Reddit and the internet. According to Community I have wasted a day because I sure as hell did not seize the day; I practically wasted the day away.



If that isn't living without regrets that what is?

After thinking about it for awhile I came up with...something. I wouldn't call it a conclusion or an epiphany; its not nearly good enough to be either of those... but it's a start.


For a long time I regretted what happened last year. Looking back at it, I did a lot of dumb stuff and I got hurt and heartbroken and ended up essentially throwing the first year of college away. I felt like I wasted a year of my life and I didn't really get anywhere with it. It was just a period where everything went wrong and I screwed up. I regretted that year a lot... until recently.


That year I grew a lot. The best thing you can do is learn from your mistakes and... I made a ton of mistakes. I learned that I don't know what romantic love feels like. I learned how stupid desperation and a longing for a reciprocation of feelings can make me. I learned how stupid it is to throw almost everything away for the sake of a person...that clearly doesn't feel the same way I do. I learned I'm not as alone as I thought I was and I learned how alone some people really were.


I feel many different things about last year, but one of the things I do not feel is regret. While I do think that in a nutshell almost everything I did can be described by the word "stupid", I don't regret doing those stupid things because I learned. I have accepted that I did things and those things didn't turn out great, but in the long run I am a better more knowledgeable person because of it.


Is that how you start to live a life without regrets?

To accept you've done and see it as a learning experience that has molded you into the person you are now?

And if your past has made you into a person you don't want to be, would living without regret be molding yourself into the person you want to be while maintaining that your past, while you are not happy to have had it, is something you will learn from?

I don't know the answer, but someday I hope to find some sort of conclusion to these thoughts. Until then, I will live my life according to the former.

I'd rather live it, because dreamers always dream and never get it.