How You Can Move on From Regret
You Are Better Than Your Missed Opportunities
We all come across missed opportunities in life. Most of them are small and irrelevant to the overall span of our lives here on earth. Things like choosing the wrong meal at a restaurant or getting a bad haircut are not things that torment us throughout life.
Missed opportunities are also becoming easier to solve. We can now return goods we did not like quickly. This gives us the power to reverse the decisions we initially made. However, it can also cause us to devalue our original choices, leading to other problems.
Nevertheless, regret is much deeper than forgetting to turn the running tap off in your bathroom before leaving. Although all feelings of regret stem from the same place, some are deeper and more painful than others.
When the cost of making a choice outweighs the opportunity we could have received by a significant amount, we feel regret. I am a person who has spent much of my life trying to avoid this, yet still, I suffered from a few regrets of my own.
I have found there are two types of regret, and the second type is much harder to overcome than the first. The first type is where we have missed our opportunity and do not directly feel the implications of that cost in our everyday lives.
An example of this is a divorce. You could probably count many opportunities that you missed to save your marriage. However, now the person is gone, the cost of the divorce has also gone with it. You no longer have constant nights of arguing or lost sleep. What remains is the pain of making the decision or decisions you made.
However, the second type is more burdensome. This is regret where the cost of your missed opportunity directly impacts your life. And this is the worst type of regret because you must live with the cost of your decision.
An example of this could be choosing to have a baby at a young age. The cost of having the child will constantly remain with you, and you also feel the pain of making the decision.
I have experienced both types of regret, and each has been tremendously hard to overcome. However, there is hope for the pain you may feel.
Perspective Is Everything
How we choose to see things will inevitably lead to our interpretation of them. The essential thing to understand about perception is that it is not just about the object, but also about our will.
Our choices are the objects of the decisions we make. And for the most part, they serve us well because they are aligned to our will. In fact, all of our choices are aligned to our will and a representation of what we desire.
That is why those who must live with their cost find it harder to free themselves from regret. In some sense, it defines them and is a picture of what they wanted in life. And even though that may not be true in the present, their past choices haunt them.
However, even though we are time-bound creatures, our perspective is not. Unlike regret, the way we choose to represent the world around us is not bound by time but rather by our will. Humans are powerful in this sense because they can desire to see things from a different perspective.
You could see a rock as grey and pointy or as a solid. You can also choose to move the rock out of its original environment and see how it looks when flying through the air or skimming across the water. Each one provides a different representation of the rock, and each requires a new desire to see the rock differently.
We can do the same thing with our regret. The passed choices which we regret do not need to be seen one-dimensionally. Seeing it in this way will lead you to haunt yourself continuously.
But you can see it from a unique perspective. Take time to think about how the missed opportunity has revealed something about you. Try to understand why you made the choices you did and why they felt right at the time?
When we start to see our regrets from different perspectives, we realise that they are not there to hold us back. Instead, they are there to teach us something about who we were and who we are now. By using our regret, we can self-reflect more deeply about the type of person we are.
You Can Only Live in the Present
How we choose to interpret our lives through time is our perspective. You could look back on your life and feel no gratitude for it. And another person could run a tape of your life and wished they lived as you did.
You could also use your present situation to look into the future. Using your perspective, you could fear it or be hopeful for it. However, we are not our perspective. Our perspective sets the stage for how we live our lives. We can not excite any emotion we had in the past or will have in the future.
Unfortunately, the experience you had whilst on holiday can not be recreated from the comfort of your room through photos. However, you can feel grateful, and it can make you happier.
You can only experience emotions in the present because that is the only place we can live. Therefore, we should not let the happiness of our lives be governed by past experiences or future hopes.
Although both of these time-bound states are essential to our fulfillment, they put a limit on the happiness we can experience in the present. For some of us who have regrets, they will destroy our ability to experience happiness now.
Planning for your future is important, and of course, your memories are valid for your life experience. But if we choose to frame our happiness based on any of these two perspectives our lives will be out of our control. We can not change our past, and we can not predict our future. So, allowing the grounds to which we live our lives to be kept in these periods will always leave us uneasy.
With regret, we choose to set our perspective in the past. This causes us to live our lives in the past. Sometimes it can make us believe that we can change our past or somehow correct our missed opportunities. But the reality is, we can not. We can only live in the now.
Although this sounds upsetting, it should also be a sign of hope for our regret. You no longer need to let it torment you or cause you pain. By having the courage to change your perspective to the present, you can live on a new landscape and make decisions that matter now. After all, you can not make any decisions anywhere else but in the now.
A Closing Thought
To understand you are more than your missed opportunities, you must acknowledge the opportunities you have in the present. You made it this far despite your regrets and lost chances, and that is a testimony to your character.
You can escape regret and begin to thrive because you can choose to live in the present. You will never be able to get rid of your past decisions, but that those not mean you are out of choices. You can still make choices, and you can still live.
It only takes the courage to focus your perspective on who you are today. And the person you are today is what matters. By focusing on the past, you will only miss more opportunities available to you in the present.