Look back in wonder. Don’t let regrets obliterate the present and destroy the future.
Regrets? I’ve had a few.
Lots, actually.
And they linger.
But regret can be a pool into which I slip with good intentions and soon find myself drowning. Regret destroys the present.
Over twenty years ago in Singapore I had a therapist — a wonderful man from California — who, in the face of my regrets and accompanying resentments told me that the present is not possible without the past but to focus on the past at the expense of the present is to deny the future.
It took me a while to unravel that but when I did I accepted its power.
And then promptly forgot it for another decade or so because resentment and the anger that comes with the sense of wasted time was so much easier to grasp than acceptance.
Make of that what you will but the very things that make me me and which have brought me to this exact moment are the things that I have experienced in my past.
A different past, in other words, and I would not be me and I would not be sitting writing this. That may or may not be a good thing — for all number of reasons — but it is inescapable. And if something is truly inescapable then insanity is really the only alternative to acceptance.
Insanity perfectly describes some of the options I have chosen in the last forty years. But through luck rather than good judgement I have recovered an element of good sense and am now ready to mine the crazy years and the years of regret and excess for material on which to base a better future. I look back now only to pick up gems, not to wallow in the mud.
Wordsworth talked of emotion recollected in tranquility. Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down The Bones talks of composting — letting experiences fertilise our imaginations.
What we live through only makes sense and can be transmuted into some sort of art with distance, experience, and a colder eye. Writing from the heat of the moment may deliver great reporting but it cannot, because of its very immediacy, capture the full historical, emotional, or transformative context.
And of this, too, I am now certain: when we focus on the past and get angry about wasted time or about the time we will never see again, this is really about hating who we have become. It is self-loathing. We believe we are somehow not true to ourselves or following the path of our true destiny. We think that if only we had done this one thing or not done this other thing then the course of our lives would be different — better — and we would be the people that we were destined to become.
This way madness lies. And rage.
