Life Is Too Short for Regrets

Regret is such wasted energy – this is what my guide will always tell anyone when we’re doing readings or coaching. I must say, I completely agree with her.

What can you do with regret? And who benefits from this emotion? Not you nor the other person or situation. It’s a heavy emotion and that just sits there! There’s nothing that you can do with it! It’s the kind of negative emotion that burrows down into your heart and manages at the same time, to find a permanent place of residence in your head too!

Our time on this earth is so short. Days roll into weeks, weeks into months and months into years and when you look again, you don’t recognise the person staring back at you in the mirror. I was told by someone who lost her husband when they were both at a stage in their lives where their children were just moving out the house and a whole new chapter was opening up for them, that if she had known when she was younger that he would leave so soon, she would have spent less time fighting and living in regret and much more time, just showing her husband how much she truly loved him.

That’s so sad to hear but it really hit home for me. Whilst we know on a soul level when our time will be up, we don’t know on a conscious level. We have no idea that when we walk out the front door today, we may never return. Or our loved ones may never return. Yet we do waste so much time on trivial nonsense that we allow to occupy our hearts and our minds. We do things and say things to our loved ones that we would never do or say to perfect strangers. And of course, in most instances, we immediately regret what we did or what we said. We immediately regret our behaviour and wish that there was a way to take it back.

Of course you can’t take it back. You can’t change what you said or did. But…. you can take action! You can apologise and set things right. I know that admitting that we did something terrible and facing the consequences of our actions is really hard to do. However, when we do, there’s an immediate feeling of a weight being lifted off us. And of course, the conversations in our heads stop. That’s a really good thing. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life going back to the same awful memory over and over again.

Naturally you will feel bad and from time to time, you may think about your actions and that’s not such a bad thing. As long as when you do, you can say to yourself with absolute confidence that you did everything that you could, to fix the problem, to apologise and make things right. Making things right, takes away those emotions that hold us in a sense of regretting what we did.

Sometimes we may be faced with a decision for our life that we don’t make because we fear the outcome. We then find ourselves, somewhere further down the line, thinking about our life and what it would be like if we had made the decision. That can also take us down the road of regrets. At this time, you need to admit to yourself that you were fearful of the outcome and that you did the best with what you had at the time, and that’s okay. Don’t be too hard on yourself and never allow yourself to step into the space of creating scenarios of how your life would have played out if only…

Our lives are too short for regrets. Live your life in the moment of every day. Enjoy everything about your life and be open and honest with those that you love. Don’t wait to apologise. Don’t wait until it’s too late to say how bad you feel about your behaviour and let the person know that going forward, you will not repeat the same behaviours and actions. That’s pretty much all you can do.

In the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, we are told :

Be impeccable with your word
Don’t take anything personally
Don’t make assumptions
Always do your best

These four agreements form the practical path to personal freedom. I published an article in October 2018 detailing these Four Agreements and you can read about them here http://spiritconnection.co.za/the-four-agreements/