The past should rest in peace

Just like water flowing downhill, life must travel in a forward direction. It may curve from left to right and dig a few deep holes, but it will keep moving. When it stops it becomes stagnant and loses its appealing attributes. No one wants to drink water from a moss-covered, murky mud hole.

You should never forget where you come from, but living in the past will only cause you to lose your appealing attributes. Remembering your past should be brief and temporary, like stopping in for a spot of tea with your old self, listening to the words of wisdom that you’ve already learned. If we prolong the visit, the past will become like the friend who crashes on our couch. After days of lazing around and never showering, this can become quite offensive.

I know firsthand that it’s easy to have regrets. Maybe it’s for many large, bad choices, or dozens of small ones. But prolonged looking back, and living those regrets every day is a cop-out! It prevents you from experiencing the present. You won't feel today and the emotions it brings. You will never be able to stay in the moment. Your life will become aimless, your direction will be backwards and stagnation will set in. Living in the past allows your heart to be numb to the present. You are so consumed by the should have, could have, would have, that you miss the now.

So if this is your tendency, I recommend having a funeral for the past. Write down all your regrets and mistakes, all the hurts that have been inflicted. Find a box and bury them. Mourn the past, shed as many tears as required, wail and moan about how bad your life has been up until now. From time to time, you may even want to stop by the grave and leave flowers. But whatever you do, don’t dig it back up, because the past should rest in peace.

Procrastination is expensive

Procrastination is putting off doing something until a future time. Delaying something needlessly. We all have things we don’t like to do. My husband tends to procrastinate when he is treading on unfamiliar ground. Other times it may be something painful we are putting off: a doctor’s visit, eating better, exercise. Then there are the times when we just delay needlessly, for no apparent reason. Maybe it’s a trip, a new purchase or making a phone call.

Time or money may be the root cause of our procrastination. I have mastered putting something off until a future time, and unfortunately this has led to many regrets. Life is fragile and delays can never be redeemed.

A few weeks before my dad died, I had an overwhelming desire to drop everything and go to Disneyland with him. I knew it wasn’t practical, I had no money and he probably couldn’t have gotten the time off work, but the thought lingered. I pushed it out of my mind until some future time. I also wanted to send him a movie that I knew he would enjoy, yet I delayed needlessly. I procrastinated! Those choices can never be redeemed. There is no “do over.”

Every time I talked to my dad he would tell me he was going to come back for a visit. In the spring it would be in the fall and in the fall it would be in the spring. The seasons always changed and we always hoped he would come.

Procrastination was one of his identifying trademarks. We knew he would eventually do it, just slower than most. Sometimes procrastination can save valuable energy. You have had time to make the right decision, which leads to less regrets. At other times, procrastination wastes valuable energy. You have delayed needlessly and have missed a window of opportunity that will never open again. Telling someone how you feel, taking a long-awaited trip, sending that one-of-a-kind gift, making a phone call. In an instant, those things may not be an option, and your delay has cost you a missed chance and given you a life filled with regret. That is the high price of procrastination.

Two wrongs never make a right

If my coffee is too sweet, I never add more sugar to fix the problem. It’s the same with our lives. Sometimes we get into difficult situations. We may have made a wrong turn and have lost our direction. Survival books will tell you that the best thing to do in these situations is to stay calm, stop and regain your composure. Usually we do the opposite: we panic and keep moving, ending up far off course.

This happened to my mom when she was in an unhappy marriage. Because she never stopped to regain her composure, she ended up far off her original path. Instead of leaving my dad and finding herself, she made her life much more complicated by finding another man. She says this was her escape route. This new man was the complete opposite of my father. He was young and immature and brought much heartache into our lives.

My mom still lives with this regret and apologizes for the pain this relationship caused her children. Looking back, she knows it was the wrong choice. From her experience, I have realized many valuable lessons. One of the most profound is that two wrongs never make a right. If you have made a bad choice, you can find your way out. The trick is to STOP. Don’t make anymore decisions, evaluate your situation and stay calm. Find a trusted, all-knowing friend, and brainstorm. Throw every possible solution into the air. Write them down. There is no right answer at this stage—just options. Think about them all, weighing the pros and cons. Who will get hurt? What will cause the least damage? Can it be fixed? Come up with plans A, B and C. Then make a decision. Hopefully it will be the right one.

You may know instantly that plan A was the incorrect choice, but don’t give up hope. Move onto plan B, and then all the way through Plan X if needed. If you have made a wrong decision, there is a 50% chance the next one will be right. And always remember, no matter how you add, subtract or multiply, two wrongs will never make a right.


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Cherish the time you have

The last time I saw my dad, he hugged me and said, “Don’t bother coming back out, I know it’s hard on you.” We’d just had an amazing week of visiting him, and I had an overwhelming feeling that I might not see him again. As we drove off, I had more regrets than I normally did. I began to wonder if I had made the right decision in leaving California.

As I contemplated the choices I had made, I came to the realization that I cherished my dad more by not being around him all the time. When we were together, usually once every year, I valued every second of it. I recorded the memories and the feelings so that I could replay them later, when he was no longer there. I didn’t have to deal with the day-in-day-out stresses of life. He usually had something spectacular planned. He would tell us, “It’s all about you,” and we knew for that one week it was.

My dad was never a serious person, so I am grateful that during our long phone conversations I learned things about him and his childhood that he probably would not have told me in person. I’m thankful that he had the ability to cherish those around him: his wife, who had dozens of notes of adoration; his children, whom he regularly told how much he valued them; and all his family and friends that he took the time to treasure.

I probably would have never moved if I knew my dad would die. I would have stayed close and enjoyed every moment I had with him. Unfortunately, we never know that about anyone. How many people would we treat differently if we knew they would be gone tomorrow? What would we say to them today? Time is the most valuable commodity we have. Your house, your car, your credit cards—they won’t miss you when you’re gone. But those whom you took the time to cherish will.

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Regret is our GPS

Regret goes hand-in-hand with loss. What kind of regrets will we have in life? How many decisions do you look back on and wish you could change? When you face loss, you always will have regrets. This is true not just with the death of a loved one, but with anything in life, including the loss of your job, your home or your spouse.

The worst part of regret is that, if you don’t have any, you will never learn from your mistakes. On the other hand, if you have too many, you will always be looking behind you and never move forward. So the lesson I learned is this: when you feel regret, stop and think about what it’s trying to tell you.

I regret that, during the last conversation I had with my dad, I was too busy to stop and cherish our talk. I didn’t sit down and enjoy our conversation. Did I tell him I loved him? I don’t remember—I was in too much of a rush. So what does this tell me? That, as usual, I was being impatient and thinking about things and not people.

My regrets are unsettling. They make me doubt my future decisions and also make me aware of my many failures. Regrets are much like a Global Positioning System. They are the annoying voice reminding you that somewhere along the trip you have gotten off course. They alert us when we have gone in the wrong direction. They prod us to take a new route. We may choose to ignore the advice our regrets are offering, but that will only result in us becoming thoroughly lost. On the other hand, if we listen to our regrets, we can change our path and safely arrive at our preprogrammed destination. We all know where we want to go; the hard part is arriving at our destination. Next time the annoying voice of regret tries to speak, it’s best to listen. Chances are, you have made a wrong turn somewhere along the way.


What are your biggest regrets? What have you learned from regret?

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We all live with our mistakes

This goes hand in hand with forgiveness, because sometimes we think it is our job to punish people for treating us badly. “I’m going to make them pay!” “They’ll regret ever hurting me.” “I’ll get them back!”

But I have some good news for you! When someone has a tendency to treat people badly and does not take others’ feelings into account, they will end up hurting themselves more than anything you could ever do to them. I’m not saying this will happen overnight. And sometimes we may not think it’s a mistake at the time. Take, for example, a parent who works excessively and does not have time to spend with their children. They may reason: I am working hard so that I can provide a nice home, clothing and a comfortable lifestyle for my kids. Truthfully, those are all good things, and there is no right answer. The problem will come twenty years from now, when the children are grown. How will they feel? Will they be thankful that you provided them with an abundant home, designer clothing and all the best money can buy, or will they be resentful because they felt you were never around when they needed you most?

Or let’s use a more black-and-white decision as an example: to have an extramarital affair. You can do it—many people do—and you probably won’t get arrested, but what consequences will you have to live with from that one mistake? Divorce, guilt, loss of trust. You may not see the consequences right away, because you are caught up in the moment, but there will be consequences and they will produce a ripple effect for years to come.

My parents, my grandparents, my aunts, my uncles, my brother and my sister, as well as myself, are all living with our mistakes. No one can do more damage than we can do to ourselves. So when you feel like it’s your job to get even, just step back and smile, fully confident that things have a funny way of coming back around.