Regret: Drop Your Shovel, Part 2

Isn't that an uplifting quote? The amazing, wonderful thing about it is ... Fitzgerald is so right! I have been blessed to see this happen for many people I know, and I'm getting to experience it for myself, as well. 

It's a good thing, too, or life would look and feel pretty bleak.

In Drop Your Shovel, Part 1, I suggested that in spite of being young and dumb ... or even being old and in the middle of a midlife crisis (or, heck, maybe even both) ... and, therefore, making ridiculously bad and oftentimes life-changing decisions, we can stop digging the deep hole of despair and move forward.

Let's look at that ...

You've sought help from those who've been there and done that with their lives, and you've done all the things they've suggested for moving forward in a healthy, fulfilling, productive way.

You're seeing the blessings and experiencing true joy and happiness for the first time in years, it seems.

You are there.

But a nagging problem lingers: Regret.

Regret still sometimes seeks to destroy your newfound feelings of peace. Regret showers you with feelings of shame and guilt — the very feelings that took you deep into that dark hole in the first place.

Somehow, then, you have to make peace with your regrets. I'm sure you've heard and read this quote many times: "There are no regrets in life, only lessons learned."

That's definitely one perspective to take to make peace with regrets. The fact is, we all have done things we wish we had not, or we have done things we wish we had done differently. We are human, after all. Lots of times, we take those experiences, learn from them, and do better next time. Those are regrets that become lessons. We truly, truly need to let those go, especially if we were doing the best we could at the time, with the emotional, social and spiritual resources we had available to us.

Sometimes, however, our past behaviors have so negatively affected others that we truly HURT them. We didn't just hurt ourselves; we harmed someone or someones in some major, life-altering way.


That's hard regret with which to make peace.

Frankly, I think it's okay to have those kinds of regrets. We need reminders that we do not live in a vacuum, and we need to take responsibility for ourselves. Those kinds of regrets also can serve as good reminders to behave ourselves and to be less selfish in our newly responsible, peaceful, loving lives. We all need appropriate motivations.

But let's let those regrets simply serve as reminders to us. No one needs another bag of guilt and shame to drag around. It's over. It's done. Move on.

One of my all-time favorite quotes by the late, great Maya Angelou is, "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better."

The fact is, only a minority of people (4 percent) in the world are truly evil. Those people don't care whether they harm others, and in fact, get off on it.  I don't think that's you and me, though. Instead, I think we go and do and behave according to what we know to do.

I subscribe to the pain theory: People behave the way they do because of deep pain they've experienced in their lives. We either seek to right the wrongs of the pain we've experienced, or to prevent further pain. It's a way of gaining some semblance of control over our lives. Unfortunately, those methods often become misguided attempts at making sense of the world and protecting ourselves ... so we just create further pain.

So it's simple, though not easy: Our pain shapes us, and it skews our views of the world and people. We think and do what we think and do because that's what we know to think and do.

So now you know better. You got help, and you've begun to think better. You're thinking better, so you're doing better. You are doing your best to live in a way in which you feel proud.

The "only" thing (ha ha) left is forgiveness.

My experience is that the only way we are able to forgive ourselves is to ACCEPT that God has forgiven us. You see, God knew what we were going to do before we did it. Even better, He knows WHY we've done the things we've done. God understands the story behind the story. 

Accept God's forgiveness of you, and you will find you have forgiven yourself. That's the only way to make peace with those harmful regrets of the past.

Keep working with and hanging out with those people who have helped you. Remember, they've been there and done that, and they will help you when you falter. No journey is perfect, especially in unfamiliar territory. Stay connected to your friends, family and support network walking this new road with you.

It just keeps getting better.

Next: What about those people you hurt? We can look at that in "Drop Your Shovel, Part 3." (And that's the end of the parts.)