Living Life Without Regrets…

It’s really a matter of perspective. I told myself a (very) long time ago that I would not allow myself to become burdened by the emotional distress of regrets. That’s a pretty tall order if you look at it strictly on the surface.

Personally for me, life without regrets simply means that I acknowledge the fact that my decisions or actions were done based on the information known at the time the decision or action was made and or done. How many times have we all said out loud or to ourselves that we would have done something differently if we had only been aware of a certain point or thing, I know I’ve done that thousands if not hundreds of thousands of times.

So does that mean that I am living with the regrets of those decisions or actions? No, not in the least. Because I know that I made the best decision possible based on the information that was available to me at the time I made that decision. Does that mean that I wish I could have done something differently? Yes, very much so!

I think we’ve all made the public or private comment that we would love to be able to go back and live some part of our lives over, knowing what we know now. Yet at the same time, the decisions we make, both good and bad have lead us to the place where we are today. All of that includes not just the physical but the emotional state we find ourselves. We get burned on a few things and we learn from them, some just need a few more lessons than others before we realize that we need to develop a different perspective on the situation.

I can put myself in that category so very easily. I have drummed my head against the preverbal brick wall about certain things far longer than most people. While I have moved past the concept of ‘self-blame’ when it comes to certain situations, I still have a bit of journey before I can fully reach the point where I am no longer governed by the ‘why’ concept.

I had a friend once tell me that I suffered from what is called ‘Paralysis of Analysis’ and he was very correct in his observations. There are no guarantees that once a problem has been identified that the solution will follow. Just because my personal affliction now had a name, it did not mean that I would find some simple answer or remedy. The true difficulty for me lies in my own inability to tell my brain to just shut up, sit down and listen. Meaning that in retrospect I’ve lost the ability to maintain the proper mixture of logic and emotion.

People cannot survive in a wholesome manner if these two concepts are not equally matched or balanced within our personal psychological infrastructure. If you operate on too much logic, we can lose the ability to empathize with the world around us. It works the same way with emotion; those that live their lives governed by emotion can very well become overwhelmed by the world around them.