Mindfulness

What to Do with Regret?

In our life’s journey

My father will soon be gone from this Earth a full calendar year. Not a day goes by that I’m not hit with a memory of him. The images arrive unbidden and with it, a flood of different emotions.

The gift of memory is its ability to rewind and move forward with ease; the psychic lens taking in the past at warped and anachronistic speed.

Memory allows me to see my father’s eyes teeming with pride on a cruise ship a couple of years ago, and suddenly, a moment of me at five raking leaves beside him.

Emotion arrives with each snapshot of our past. Sometimes, it’s a welcome feeling like the one that arrives when I think of my dad and I throwing an orange ball back and forth on a summer night. Other times, the memory is riddled with regret at things either of us said or did.

My father’s love was often eclipsed by insecurity.

We become what we think.

Memories of hanging up on my father arrive with a flood of regret. It is only hindsight and time that allows the lens to shift, that permits the view to grow clear.

Dad hungered to be loved. Like a child, he would do anything and everything for that love.

It never occurred to my father that he was love. So he fought for it; he chased it; he demanded it.

What we focus on grows.

My father focused on the lack of love he felt. So, he experienced this.

Love is an open hand, not a closed fist.

Spiritual Antennae

Each of us has spiritual antennas. We can and do sense things constantly. We can feel a room’s energy; we can sense how someone is feeling.

My father’s antennae sensed that he was perceived as a handful.

Yet, the more desperate he was for love, the more he measured it. And this caused my spiritual antennae to retract, to pull away.

No one wants love shoved down their throat. Resentment forms when one is told how to love.

And yet.

I now sit with the flood of memories that arrive with the space and time without my father’s physical presence: my decision to not pick up the phone when I saw his number on the Caller ID, my reluctance to visit him more than a couple of days, my inner thought process to avoid him.

What I wouldn’t give to have a moment to tell my father how loved he is and always will be.

Regret. We can’t live without experiencing this sticky, heavy emotion.

What to Do with Regret?

We humans have a tendency to push things away, to hide what we don’t want to look at under a figurative rug.

Except, like Edgar Allan Poe’s story A Tell-Tale Heart illustrates, the more we conceal the truth of something, the more it festers.

If we want our psychic wounds to heal, we need to bring them to the light of day.

I regret not telling my father he was and is love. I regret avoiding him.

Voicing my regret, the wound can start to heal. A peace begins to permeate my heart. An acceptance that both my father and I did the best we could while in this dance called life.

Regrets are invisible anchors in our soul. If unaddressed, they weigh us down.

By looking directly at the regret felt regarding my father, I learned an invaluable lesson:

We can never love someone enough for them to love themselves.

My father’s hunger for love taught me that love is an inner journey.

When regret arrives, there is an opportunity to welcome its sticky discomfort, to look it directly in its painful eyes and ask:

What are you here to teach me?

Only then, like a Chinese finger trap, will you be free.

A shoutout to Melissa Mc for her inspiring piece about embracing our awesomeness: