Forward Regret!

Shit happens, two and two don't always make four. Little annoyances lodge themselves like splinters in the mind. That concert you missed, that opportunity you dashed, that jacket you lost, that plan that came to naught, that moon landing you slept through: principles lose their balance in a hail of cumulative and entirely regrettable debris. So what to do? How to forget? There are the simple options of course: bury your worries in material objects, drink yourself under the table, commit seppuku, blame the Jews. There'll be some short-term satisfaction there, and surely it beats a killing spree, but still: is it enough? Won't those tendrils of doubt still find a way to stick it to you? Can't you still hear them declaring victory over your well-concealed but pockmarked soul? Won't the nagging voice of ill-reason turn louder the more you try to drown it out? Regret is a siren call that turns to a hammer blow the closer you get, so...

Get your mind out of the past! There are books to read, books to write, people to meet, people to fuck, drinks to drink, drinks to spill. Regret is an unholy head-drain. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf talking about something else entirely, regret is an arid scimitar bleeding attention from present concerns. A mind divided cannot stand, especially when facing a foe as implacable as the outside world. It takes all concentration, all resources, all self-control to truly inhabit each moment. The distraction of an intractable past tears a hole in the mental fabric, allowing energy to leak out and bile to seep in. The only way to stop the wound is to give it no time to bleed. Every false scab it tells you to pick is the wound begging for allies. Left alone it will heal over, the intimations of pain only potential energy to be harnessed for worthier tasks. When pain becomes an energy source it starts to turn to pleasure. Regret becomes a catalyst for a future devoid of it. Thus even the worst of the past can be made to serve the present.

This is all a very fine way of saying get on with it. I'm struck by the occasional bout of regret, which my mind sometimes reverberates in an echo chamber of anxiety. Regret of the past turns to doubt of the present turns to forfeit of the future. This cycle must be stopped where it began by challenging the very notion of regret. Regret is simply the reminder of a past temporarily unredeemed. Once it is redeemed, once the future subsumes it into something greater, the scab recedes and clear skin and thoughts return. Regret leads to bitterness, regret leads to doubt, regret leads to a nasty road which presents an infinite number of crossroads that only take you down even nastier roads. If there must be a spiral it will be a spiral of my own devising; pressing me onward into productive action, not backward into pointless rumination. I accept the inevitability of the occasional pang from the past only on the condition that like any good hunger pang, it portends a future meal. That I will only get hungry again won't stem my enjoyment.

Despite the best efforts of mothers everywhere, messes inevitably accumulate. Entropy is a motherfucker that way. Dust settles, milk goes bad and memory fades. These things get me down but they won't keep me there. Regret can undermine a foundation but that doesn't mean a structural collapse. Rather it can encourage greater fortification, the raising of new heights, steel in place of styrofoam. It took Nietzsche to say "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger," but surely there's been some premonition of that notion in every human mind since the dawn of history. To grab hold of that premonition, to suss it out, to realize it and revel in it and will it to truth: this is the act of redemption. The past hath no fury to match the joyous scorn of a present bent on reclaiming the future. It starts now, whenever that might be, if not eternally. The way out is forward, a thousand generations have discovered. The exit is not found by searching vainly for a way to return to the womb. It is found by continual motion, in spite of and in honour of every pernicious regret that demands you turn back. A little reminder to my regrets, past present and future: There is no turning back.