Regrets? I’ve had a few – but then again, too few to mention.
“What would it be like if you’d taken a different path or made a different decision?” Oooh, I’m a sucker for surveys. This one is instigated by KP Nuts, (no kidding) who’ve paid good money to discover that the average person spends 110 hours each year regretting things.
Though why a snacks firm wants to know is a mystery – and to what purpose are they going to put the findings? Perhaps they think munching a packet of their excellent product will assuage our anxiety at roads not taken, ambitions unfulfilled or why, when opportunity knocked, we didn’t open the door? There are people born to seize life by the scruff of the neck and head singlemindedly towards their goal. Others stand about and let life happen to them, doing the lottery in the hope it will transform their circumstances. Somewhere in between are the rest of us with modest aspirations and a modicum of talent, anticipating that with a favourable wind, we’ll better ourselves.
Our lives are shaped by the decisions we make, or are made for us. As responsible parents we shepherd our children towards safe choices. Certainly in my day it was towards a secure job with a brown envelope on the first of the month and a pension. Never mind ‘following your dream’, it was imperative to make a living.
Those cautious postwar parents recoiled in stricken horror when their Sixties baby-boomer offspring expressed the wish to enrol in, for example, art college or drama school, or go backpacking through Europe, when they could instead be securely billeted in the civil service or the bank, with a job for life. Some of us went and some of us stayed and each of us accrued our own store of triumphs, disappointments and salutary lessons, all of which, combined with nature and nurture, shaped us, showed us our shortcomings and tailored our expectations.
In an ever-coarsening cultural climate, life today it would appear, belongs to the pro-active adventurous spirit, bursting with overweening confidence and unshakeable self-belief, which in some cases can be mistaken for talent. It doesn’t augur well for the naturally modest, self-deprecating and sincere and ignores entirely the cautious and risk-averse. (I recall a lady lecturer at teacher training college. “Girrrls!” she’d boom, “If you play the shrinking violet hiding in the hedge, you’ll be trampled on.” Revolutionary stuff from a maiden lady of middle years in 1963.) Into the mix to must go envy, which is endemic in the human soul – as is self-doubt, the bitterness of thwarted hopes and the opportunities we weren’t brave enough to take.
I don’t suppose too many people get through life without accumulating a hefty bundle of regrets, which of course they can choose to store in a ‘forgettery’ and throw away the key. However, they have a tendency in unguarded moments to escape and worm their way back into consciousness, generating retrospective remorse years down the line. The Loving Spouse once said to me after I’d scored a cheap conversational point which hurt another badly: “You’d consider the world well lost for a smart remark.” True – an empty victory in having the last word that damaged things beyond repair. He was kind and non-judgmental. I am neither.
Like many others of my vintage, I lie awake at night mulling over such random matters. Friendships that faltered and failed, probably through my neglect; what became of the fellows I went out with before I met The One? And what a different person I might have become had I turned down the invitation to write for this newspaper 35 years ago. I think too of the frequent bickering with the Loving Spouse over trifles and the lengthy coolnesses generated by more serious disagreements. What a criminal waste of precious time…
But looking back on things that can’t be changed is counter-productive. As somebody wise whose name I misremember once said: “Too many people ruin what could be a happy today by dwelling on a lost yesterday and thus jeopardise tomorrow.” Let it go...
