Regret

And keeping it at bay - audio embedded

It isn’t that I lose sight of how far I’ve come. It’s that I feel so stupid for not getting to this point sooner.

That sounds ridiculous, but it is true.

As I said the other day, there is no arrival, only growth. But there are days when I wish that growth had happened faster or sooner so I could’ve made better decisions in some areas, as hard as different ones probably would’ve been to make. I get stuck sometimes thinking if I’d started with the real work earlier then I wouldn’t have done that thing I’m paying for now. I’m so hyper aware of my ticking minutes and there is so much left to do. So much left that I want to do from a healthier way of living that I’ve had most of my life.

Odds are I’ll get time to do most of it if I properly apply my mind and my discipline. I’ve got some long-living ancestors. But there are days when I see my mistakes so clearly. They are all mistakes I made thinking I was doing the right thing. What makes me shake my head in wonder is that I saw the situations I messed up in so incorrectly. I had no clarity on them. I guess it’s hard to have clarity when you’re in the middle of something, when you’re dealing with all sorts of trauma past and present, when there are all sorts of hardships to accompany them, when you haven’t had the proper guidance to make good decisions for yourself — or when you just haven’t come far enough in your journey to be able to discern your ass from a hole in the ground.

I tell myself:

If you hadn’t

If you had seen

If you’d played the tape out to the end you would’ve done better.

Regret gnaws at me from the inside. When I feel it, I feel so stupid. I was supposed to know everything in advance so I’d never make a mistake. Buddhist wisdom tells us that when we fail to learn the lessons, they continue to rise up in our lives, and not only that, the stakes are higher each time they do. Thinking about that makes me anxious and scared — it feels like a punitive concept — how do we even know we’re receiving an opportunity to learn and follow the right path if we’re so blocked we only listen to our own insane thinking? If we don’t know we don’t know, how do we know that and figure out what we do need to know?

I read something this morning that reminded me that I actually wasn’t supposed to know. It reminded me that I am here to learn, and no one learns anything from being perfect and never erring in their judgment.

I came up with a mantra: I accept my lessons with grace, not anger and bitterness directed toward myself. I take myself into my own arms and say Of course you did not know, and you are forgiven. You are also blessed with the ability to know now.

My mistakes have given me the ability to have compassion and understanding for others. My mistakes have given me the ability to stop and question myself before I make a decision - something I have struggled to learn how to do and still fail to do sometimes – I guess that comes with always having to know, right? I often go back to certain scenarios from my childhood in which I was put under serious pressure and duress and treated like an adult who was supposed to know what to do. If I was given no time to consider or think before I had to act, it probably created a mind that works like a knee jerk. Indecision is never an option, so inevitably, bad decisions are made. And you know what? Bad decisions can look exciting to some people. It looks like fun to some people when those of us who aren’t sane start flying off the handle and behaving irresponsibly in whatever way and making it look like we’ve got it under control because we’ve been practicing that for our parents since we were five-years-old — what’s heartbreaking to think about is the agony it creates in our minds, bodies, and spirits that we can’t ever feel, much less talk about or show.

When we know better, we do better. —Maya Angelou

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Dissatisfaction, missed opportunities I didn’t see for what they were, disappointment over the way I performed in certain scenarios — all of those nagging ghosts can bring it on. It makes me sad to look back and know that it all comes down to hurt — hurting myself, and hurting others.

But what I am sure of is this: I have a path. I am being guided on it. There were periods of my life when I probably went directly against my guidance in many situations because I wasn’t listening to it. I didn’t know I was supposed to. I didn’t even know it was there. I hoped it was, but until I surrendered to my own powerlessness, I thought the only person I could trust was myself and I had to do it all and think it all and I wasn’t really all that trustworthy either

. I’m an adult child. I didn’t possess the tools I needed to make decisions from a place of self-love and self-respect.

So back to that mantra: I accept my lessons with grace, not anger and bitterness directed toward myself. I take myself into my own arms and say of course you did not know, and you are forgiven. You are also blessed with the ability to know now.

That reminds me. It reminds me that I didn’t get it all wrong, or things might’ve been much worse. It reminds me of the work I’ve done to heal. It reminds me that everything does happen in its own time, for reasons we may never know. It reminds me that I only know what I know today and I’ll know more tomorrow. I can’t know tomorrow today. Seems simple. It isn’t.

I am up very early this morning, as usual. Every day seems more important than the last — one more chance to get it right, or at least righter than I did yesterday. I think everyone should write their own mantra of forgiveness.

Sending peace and love,

Allison

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PS — I‘ve gotten some notes about whether or not I want to sell my artwork. I am flattered by the question, and will tell you I am working on setting up a Big Cartel shop for those sorts of things. I will let you know when it’s live. Thanks so much.