Can We Make Peace With Regret?

Jack Baruch, MD

Reflection:

If you sit with people long enough and listen carefully, you begin to notice that regret is one of the most common human emotions. Not always spoken directly, but present—just under the surface. Regret about relationships, about chances not taken, about words not said, about paths not chosen. By the time people reach later life, almost no one believes their life unfolded exactly as they once imagined it would.

We tend to think of regret as a sign that something went wrong, that we made a mistake, that we should have known better. But this may be too simple. Regret is also the price we pay for living a life in which we had to choose. Every choice eliminates other possible lives. We marry one person and not another. We choose one career and not another. We stay in one city and leave another.

The real question is not whether we will have regret. We will. The question is what we do with it. Some people turn regret into bitterness, while others turn it into wisdom. There is no life without the shadow of the unlived life. Regret can harden a person, or it can soften them. It can make a person narrower, or it can make them more compassionate, more understanding of the quiet struggles of other people.

Perhaps making peace with regret does not mean eliminating it. Perhaps it means learning how to carry it differently. Not as a verdict on our life, but as a reminder that we were human, that we did not know everything at the time, that we made the best choices we could with the person we were then.

Ending Question:

If you could speak to your younger self, would you give different advice—or would you simply tell them that life is more complicated than they think?