waste your time...i wasted mine
Before i left for kairos, my mom was being her usual bitchy "im trying to make your life miserable" self and she said that i have so many regrets and i turned to her and said "I HAVE NO REGRETS". Then, last night, she gave me this huge lecture on how horrible it is to have no regrets and blah blah blah...totally lame. so here's my argument since everyone i know seems to regret their whole goddamn life.
maybe a week ago, one of my friends told me that she wanted to be a little kid again and that she wouldn't make some of the same decisions that she has made in her past. I understand wanting to do that, but if given the chance I never would. My life isn't exactly where I want it to be at the moment, but that leaves room for improvement. Life will never be perfect, so why bother trying to picture a perfect life?
My mom told me that if i never regretted anything then i would never learn from my mistakes and i'd just continue to make them over and over. But living without regret doesn't mean that. Living without regret means accepting the choices we have made because each choice is what we wanted at that exact moment in time. Even if it was the wrong choice, we learn from that. Living without regret means accepting that life isn't perfect because if it was perfect then we would have nothing to live for - no goals, no bad things to make the good seem better, no future. If life was perfect, we'd become bored because we would have nothing to achieve. We would be completely content all the time. We would feel no emotions. We would be mindless drones. But that is not so. We do make mistakes, but we shouldn't dwell on those mistakes. We should move on and learn to change for the better.
It seems impossible to me that anyone should regret choices they have made throughout the course of their life. We cannot go back in time and change our past, so why bother wasting time thinking about it? By regretting anything, we confine ourselves to living in the past when really we should be living in the present because the choices we make today are what will affect our life tomorrow. Focusing our thoughts only on the past leads to "what-if" scenarios and what if doesnt matter...but what happened does. We made the decision we did for a reason and whatever that reason is, it was obviously important to us at the time we made our choice. Wanting to change our previous decisions is like wanting to change who we have grown to be. Everything we have experienced in life has shaped us to be who we are today.
If we changed one simple choice in our past, we would inevitably be changing our entire life as we know it. There would be a domino effect. We would be completely alien to anyone we have grown close to. We would no longer have the same friends, the same morals, the same dreams, the same interests...or maybe we would, but who could possibly know? Live in the moment. Your past is just a growing experience - accept it.
I honestly have no idea why i'm writing this. maybe just to spite my mother. and i know i just rambled and probably made no sense but...regret is just a waste of time. you cant change it, so change the way you think about it.
k. adios.