On Regrets
At the door I turn to take one last look.
Ok so it’s 2:36 am here in Lucknow and my internal monologue is loud as fuck right now. There’s something gnawing at my thoughts and I feel as if I won’t be able to fall asleep until I write this down. With no preparation, I’m just going to have to freestyle this off top.
Don’t expect a #hot #take or anything profound. It might just be a pile of platitudes that feels more like personal reassurance than any breakthrough worth sharing.
Anyways, I think this is going to be more for me than for you. But yeah with all that said I think i’m finding myself lately just because I’m quite isolated these days in my parent’s house, stuck in the room where I grew up and all and forced to be in my head so much, thinking back on things that I regret in my life. Things that I regret not doing when I was young. Things I regret doing.
I think when I was younger I perpetually lived in the future, perpetually planning for the future. I was like “I need to get the fuck out of wherever I am now. I need to be a grown up. I need to get out of here.”... and now as the first year of college has came to an end, I’ve started dwelling on the past a lot, and now it’s very easy to dwell on the past like “Remember, before...”.
There’s a pattern to this that I’m realising of what I experience, is I feel before something new happens to me, it sort of transfigures my old regrets, all the things I used to be upset about, they just shrink in size. I feel like at this point I’ve spent most of my life looking towards the future and not being present on the now.
I have accepted that I cannot predict the future... I mean that email today, couldn’t have predicted that. If I did my best with what I knew at the time, and would have done differently if I knew now what I knew then, what else can I do? I feel to a large degree we’re all stumbling around in the dark. There’s not much point in beating oneself up for not having precognition.
It’s not allowing that to keep me awake at night. I did the best I could with what I had. Besides, things do tend to work out in the end. Mistakes I made led me to some of the most important people, experiences, opportunities in my life, who I might have never come across otherwise, and that's not a cause for complaint.
So lately, when I’m about to close a door, and I know I’m gonna regret that... closing that door and choosing to go in a different direction. At the door I turn to take one last look. You teach yourself to do that, to have that one last look. It is like a form of cleaning up your memory. That last look. In case anyone should ask. in case you should ever need it.
That last look.
And then you keep going on...