Regret Is a Waste of Time When You Can’t Change the Past

An epiphany about writing, regret, and foolish rumination.

REGRET (n) 1. A feeling of sorrow, disappointment, distress, or remorse about something that one wishes could be different. 2. A sense of loss and longing for someone or something gone or passed out of existence

My aunt Ruth often said…

I never regret anything I did — only what I didn’t do.

Ruth (and other much-older women) fill my head with what I have come to think of as my old lady “light bulbs” — terse but profound reminders that I trot out of storage to illuminate difficult moments.

Ruth was right. Our biggest regrets involve things we have failed to do in our lives.

Actions cause more pain in the short-term, but inactions are regretted more in the long run.

Regret after the fact is actually quite foolish.

If what you did was wrong or bad, dumb or unkind, misguided or spiteful, you don’t get a redo. The twenty-four book editors who rejected the first Harry Potter manuscript, the producers who turned away the Beatles….well, too bad. The best they can do is learn from it. And make a more informed choice next time.

On the other hand, what you DIDN’T do might still be feasible.

Let me explain by telling you what happened to me when I decided to “become more involved” in my South Florida condo.

What I — Miraculously — Don’t Regret

I ran for our seven-member condo board in 2015 and was “recalled” — like tainted canned goods — two years later.

At the outset, I naively believe that life in our 419-unit building will improve once people are given information and helped to understand the issues.

A year and a half into my tenure, the recall campaign is launched by a fellow board member, Cruella de Condo (most buildings have one). She wants us gone — me and three other members of the board who outvote her.

Cruella has held sway over the building for at least a decade. She might no longer control the board, but she still has votes in her pocket and minions she can count on. They hold secret strategy meetings and slip slanderous notes under doors.

In the elevator, passengers gossiping in Russian and Spanish glance in my direction. Some are nasty to my face, like the real-estate agent with the stocky bulldog, an unpleasant mongrel whose jaws could demolish my delicate poodle in one bite.

“We are getting rid of you,” she screams back at me as we head down the hallway to the dog exit. ”You took kickbacks!”

Aside from the mean girl in high school who yelled across the lunchroom, “Hey, rich bitch! I hate you! ” I have few memories of feeling so despised.

On the worst days, I try to remember one of Zelda’s old lady light bulbs: It could be worse. I don’t have cancer. I haven’t lost a child.

I come through stronger, more resilient, with a greater understanding of power and people — and no regrets. It was an education.

What I DID Regret: Not Writing

During the the Condo Years, I get out of practice. I churn out reports, flyers, explanations, instructions, rules, letters telling owners what we are doing. But my writing muscle atrophies.

Wrangling language is like riding a bike and, when you get good at it, like being a tournament tennis player. Running a building is nothing like writing. Instead of focused attention, you’re tossing several balls in the air. It’s easy to forget how to concentrate and put in sustained effort…on one thing.

By the time I am ousted from the board, I have abandoned my Huffington Post advice column (“Dear Family Whisperer”). I rarely send queries to editor. I have ideas but don’t follow through.

I don’t imagine that my writing career is over per se — writing is who I am. But I almost lose the will to get back on the horse.

Writing is hard. It’s one of the few professions in which practitioners improve with age. But the process itself is never easy. I’ve heard of writers who “bang out” a book. I’m not one of them.

For a while, I beat myself up. Research suggests that serious regret is typically about “belonging” — related to romantic and family domains, rather than education or work. But this is writing, which is not just an occupation. I have a relationship with it. I give it my time and attention. I feel bad about straying.

I ease myself back by reviving my website and blog. Then, I join Medium and make peace with the new economy of online publishing. Admittedly, the month my earnings soar to $96.26, I become ecstatic. It isn’t the money. I am “working” again — as a writer.

I put one foot in front of the other. A sign on my wall helps reminds me that saying “yes” to wasting time the same as saying “no” to writing.

The Universe also seems to conspire — more likely, the Medium algorithm. “What Does it Take to Resurrect a Writing Life?” finds its way to my in-box. The author, Helen Cassidy Page, is a writer I admire. I identify with her not-writing experience:

I stopped posting daily. Then it was twice a week, then once or twice a month, but soon my Medium writing had gone the way of eight-track tapes.

Helen has some great suggestions. But every writer has her own path and her own problems. And her own regrets.

What’s the “Right” Kind of Regret?

When I mention to a fellow writer that I am working on a piece about regret, she refers to the subject as “a landmine.”

To be sure, regrets change as years wash over the incident or missed opportunity. Regret can be tempered if you feel in retrospect that you at least made a “justifiable” decision at the time. And of course, personality matters. Some of us let go more easily than others.

The writer, who prefers anonymity, regrets “not figuring out decades ago how to either be thin or accept that I’m not thin and never will be.” She worries that such rumination is “silly.”

She is hardly alone. We are more likely to have regrets about not becoming our “ideal self” (who we’d like to be) than fulfilling the responsibilities of our “ought” self (who we think we should be).

The good news is that if you don’t do something, you can still take another shot at it.

There’s always a different possibility or choice to be made. You can pick up where you left off, try again, do it a different way, or decide, after all, that you were right: It’s better not to do it.

End of regret. End of ruminating. As my 104-year-old friend Marge always says, “I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the past. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

Also consider this future-regret strategy…

Whenever you decide against an activity — doing the daily plank your physical therapist suggests, picking up the phone to reconnect with an old friend, turning down a business opportunity — consider how that decision might fly in a few weeks or a few years from now.

Ask yourself, “Will I someday regret not doing this?”

The thought of future regret motivated me to actually write the book I’ve been talking about for years and not writing. If you don’t write about your old ladies, you’ll probably be sorry.

I’m now working on the proposal. As Samuel Johnson once said about remarriage, entertaining a new book is “the triumph of hope over experience.”

The inner voice that says, You must write this book, is sometimes drowned out by others:

Do you really want to work that hard?

Haven’t you paid your dues?

It’s going to be sooooooooo hard…

No one will read it anyway.

Thankfully, since I started writing on Medium, my discipline “muscle” has slowly gotten stronger. Most of the time, I’m not procrastinating. Most days, I want to write.

Granted, the old gerbil brain can still interrupt or catch me off guard in the bath tub with a new idea: That’s a really good. Now drop everything and write it.

Hey, I’m a professional, all too familiar with the sirens of distraction. I just keep reminding myself:

• Do whatever it takes.
• You’ve been here before.
• Beating yourself up is a waste of time.
• Offer yourself a reward.
• Call a trusted friend. Ask her to talk you down from the ledge.
• Get back to it. If you don’t write this book, you’ll regret it.

That tired Nike motto doesn’t only apply to exercise. Don’t regret what you didn’t do. Just do it.

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