The Tigers of Regret

Regrets? I’ve had more than a few, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who has none. Edith Piaf may have sung, “Non, je ne regrette rien,” but she was lying through her throat.

By regrets, I don’t mean laments over minor mistakes (“If only I hadn’t had that third drink”). I mean those serious regrets you keep in the deep heart’s core. The ones that gnaw in the night, haunt your days, burn you hollow.

Popular magazines are full of cheery articles on “coming to terms” with your regrets and making them “work for you.” But they’re not regrets if you can blithely adjust to them. As for making regrets work for you, how do you pay them and in what coin?

I’m not sure that regrets carry much weight until you’ve reached a certain age. You can scarcely regret your misspent youth while still misspending it. It’s once you’re past the halfway mark that such sorrows come into their own. Princeton University psychologist Daniel Kahneman allows that there’s no hard evidence that “regret increases as life goes on,” but it sure in heck seems to. The longer you live, the more opportunities you have to make wrong decisions, take wrong turns, forsake the wrong love. A friend in his 80s tells me he wouldn’t go as far as Disraeli and declare that “old age is regret,” but the Victorian prime minister came near the truth.

Yet I’m not sure that all of us would wish to get rid of our regrets even if we could. We’re not Orpheus, who lost his wife to darkness by turning back to glance at her. It’s not so destructive for most of us to look behind. Besides, why shouldn’t we rue the day we did something deplorable? Remorse can make us sadder and wiser. Harry Truman was wide of the mark when he said, “Never, never waste a minute on regret.” Introspection, the only road to self-knowledge, is seldom a misuse of time. And it’s the regretters among us who stand some small chance of not repeating our errors.

Of course, in the long run, most of us grieve more over non-acts than over acts. A poem by W.S. Merwin starts with: “Something I’ve not done is following me.” It may be these ghostly footsteps and not our missteps that pursue us forever--the wasted possibility, the timid refusal to take a risk, the hesitation when seconds count.

In the last few years, there have been several surveys about regret. I’ve read some of the results, and they’re remarkably consistent. Most people’s greatest dissatisfaction centers on their education. University of Michigan psychologist Janet Landman says that “not getting enough education or not taking it seriously enough” is a common regret. Many folks also regret marrying too young. If it’s any consolation to these sorry souls, I can assure them it’s impossible to escape regret whatever you do. I occasionally bewail getting entirely too much education and taking it far too seriously. I regret never marrying at all--the aisle not taken, as Robert Frost might have put it. I always felt the need to deny conventional roles for women in order to strive for professional achievement. Maybe I made a mistake in creating a rigid opposition between marriage and autonomy. What I regret is not so much my choice, but my belief in either/or rather than both/and.

Here’s what I know now about regret. It’s always present, even if unseen, like the moon in the day sky. The tigers of regret are patient. They can stay hidden for a long time, then pounce. Time doesn’t soften all regrets. Some live even beyond the grave, inherited by the next generation. To regret is human; to be human is to regret.