For all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
-Maud Muller

Entering the second half of life is fraught with perils; among the more insidious and destructive of which is a very human tendency to give in to regret. If nothing else will throw you into a morass of despair, regret will.

Regret is a pernicious emotion -- and also by its nature a stupid and illogical one. Illogical because you can’t do anything about what happened in the past, yet you will still waste energy dwelling on the ‘might have beens.’ Stupid because it takes you away from the moment and puts life progress into limbo. Regret arises with expectations, and expectations are as illogical as regrets. Expectations tell you that what you hope will happen, should happen. If it doesn’t, then you feel like the victim of a celestial joke. Wish upon stars at your leisure, because that can be a positive impulse, but if the Jiminy Cricket advise fails to manifest itself, don’t go into a funk. That makes as much sense as those benighted souls who do no financial planning for their later years, but are counting on winning a lottery prior to age 65. It’s true. Those people exist and have the legal right to bear children and vote in elections. There’s a scary gene pool. So, the long-and-short of it comes down to: no expectations -- no regrets.

In terms of regret, though, I’ve periodically entertained the idle thought that if only I could go back to being 18 again, but armed with the ammunition of what I know now, then by God, I’d be king of the world, or at least of my own little part of it.

I’d be able to sweet-talk any girl into bed, because I wouldn’t be shy and insecure. Nor would I be so unsophisticated that I wouldn’t see when a splendid offer of carnal bliss was being made to me. I’d also know which ones to not waste time and energy on. Alas, experience taught me the signs too late.

In my retrospective stroll through life I would get dazzling grades in school and university, because I’d already know the system, and know how to stroke the egos of all those inadequate twerps who allegedly taught me my courses. All it would take would be a little politeness, mastery of a few chosen buzz-words and plenty of sucking up, all the while being sure to make references to the astonishing scholasticism of the instructor and the dreary thesis he or she had once penned to pick up their pathetic little masters degree. In fact, I did learn this while I was still in university, but it was near the end of my course-of-study, so I only gained slight advantage.

If the instructor was female, I would be mildly flirtatious. If she was homely I’d be even more flirtatious, and relentlessly charming.

When I entered the workaday world in my retro fantasy, I would move up through the career plateaus on the job so fast I would leave everyone in my dust, because I’d know exactly what to do. I would suss out who the real power-brokers in the business happened to be, and then I would brown-nose like there was no tomorrow. I’d choose my allegiances and alliances carefully, and I would always do whatever was asked of me, without whining or grimacing. Instead, I would say things like: “That’s a smashing idea, Mr. Chambers -- or, would it be impertinent if I called you Bob? I don’t want to get above myself. I know I’m new here, and there is so much that I want to learn from you. I consider you to be something of a mentor.”

The foregoing is fantasy. My reality and your reality is, we are where we are, and there’s no going back to put things right a la ‘Back to the Future.’ It’s probably just as well because we’d end up screwing up in some other way that might be even more disastrous than what we have now.

The thing about regret is rather than give into it, look at it logically. The fact that you’re able to read this is blessing in itself, because it means you’re literate. The reflection that you had a good meal tonight, and will be sleeping in a cozy bed, far away from the elements, gunfire, and jack-booted secret police thugs tramping up your steps at 4 a.m. to haul you away, is a splendid opportunity for gratitude, since it’s obvious that you’re among the world’s chosen. For all the ‘good things’ that didn’t happen due to personal cowardice, ignorance, laziness or ineptitude think about your escapes from misfortune like the time you didn’t hit that semi head-on after you went into a skid on black ice; the barely tolerable lust-object who ‘didn’t’ get pregnant; the time you finally decided against going into the army, which was what you were planning to do just to get back at everybody who was against you; the time you didn’t get caught cheating on a college exam, but the poor putz sitting behind you did, and ended up getting suspended. Take a page from the book of George Bailey. Maybe there’s a ‘Clarence’ looking out for you, too.

Does that help? No -- I thought not.

But, if you’re not grateful for where you are, then your middle aged angst and depression will fester as you ruminate on the on variations of the following regrets:

• not taking that year out after you graduated, and heading to Europe. Instead, you took that nice secure job in the bank. The same bank where you’re still working fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years later, and you still haven’t gone to Europe in the way you wanted to, but only on a dorky three-week package tour that was choreographed by a dropout from Saddam Hussein’s secret service: “We have the morning to see the Uffizi Gallery here in Florence, and then be back at the bus so that we can head on to Rome for the Coliseum, Forum and Vatican in the afternoon. Be punctual!”
  
• not telling your parents where they could put their “You must be practical and get a college education and enter a profession!” and following your dream of being a cartoonist. This hurt even more when you learned of the heft of the estate left by the late Charles Shulz.
  
• getting married as young as you did, because you were insecure and lonely, and wanted to get out of your parents’ house, instead of entering into all sorts of fabulous liaisons with females from every culture on the planet, and then finally making your decision to wed around about the age you are now.
  
• never learning a musical instrument, and consequently never getting the chance to play in a truly great rock-and-roll band, or even a mediocre one.
  
• not shipping out to sea when you were 17, therefore not getting the chance to be a roguish man-of-the-world. Yes, you could get a tattoo and pieced ear now, but they would only make you look like a pathetic asshole.
  
• not having kept your really cherry GTO and instead selling it at a loss so you could accommodate your wife, the firstborn and all the baby paraphernalia.
  
• not having been at Woodstock.
  
• not having been part of the ‘Love Generation’ and all that that entails.
  
• not having learned to surf at a young age.
  
• not having taken the chance to send off that manuscript to a publisher, because you were afraid it would be rejected, so consequently it got relegated to a cardboard box in the garage, and eventually the mice got at it and chewed a lot of pages, and you checked it again and thought it was a piece of shit, and who were you kidding, so you burned it.
  
• not having spent enough time with your grandparents so that you could truly appreciate who they were. There are gaps in your memories of them that you regret.
  
• being ‘too busy’ to really pay attention to your kids when they were growing from infancy into toddler-hood, and so on through the years.
  
• being ‘too busy’ to really pay attention to all the genuinely good things about your spouse.
  
• never getting that dream home, but settling for a crappy little suburban bungalow in a so-so neighborhood.
  
• never going back to the land with your own parcel of dirt, and your own chickens, ducks and moo-cows.
  
• deriding your old man’s military service because all he became was a lousy pay-clerk, rather than a hero, and neglecting to appreciate that any service is a sacrifice when a guy is separated from loved ones.
  
• never having gotten a boat bigger than a canoe, or else having sold your old ski-boat for the same reason you offloaded the GTO.
  
• never having learned to fly.
  
• never having seen the Taj Mahal, the Athenian Acropolis, the Great Pyramids, the Upper Amazon (or the Lower, for that matter), or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and probably never having the chance to do so.
  
• were sick, so missed the chance to see the Beatles live in concert.
  
• never quite getting-around-to paying a last visit to a relative or friend in his or her terminal days in hospital.
  
• never having earned any sort of award whatsoever, in school, in college, in business or in your community. Realizing you never did much to warrant such accolades, and feeling a sense of failure as a consequence.
  
• missing, due to business, your kid’s school concerts, little-league home-run, solo figure-skating performance, or whatever else it is that children do that seem of so little consequence to adults at the time.
  
• getting drunk at a staff Christmas party and telling a colleague what you “really don’t like” about him or her, for which he/she never truly forgave you. You are only grateful that you never told your boss what you really thought.
  
• getting drunk and making a pass at somebody’s wife, who at the time looked at you in both horror and disgust, and then walked away. You, in your intoxication, thought she was coming on to you. You’ve never been so mortified in our life.

My personal regrets today are fewer than they were at one time. A few factors have contributed to this diminishing of disappointment. I’ve become more realistic with age, and I’ve become more honest in acknowledging my own failures. I haven’t been put-upon by outside forces, I’ve crapped on myself. I’ve made bad choices. I’ve been lazy about making judgment calls. In fact, the least significant cause of any misfortune I’ve experienced has been bad luck. I’ve had some rotten fortune, to be certain, but most of the time when the luck looks bad, it was because I had set the process in motion. We tend to do that.

I recall a conversation with a female I know well, and she told me how she had just come out of a relationship that had gone to hell. She’d already been divorced a couple of times, and a number of other relationships had come and gone in her life.

“Go figure,” she said, and then recited a litany of the guys flaws; some of them pretty bad ones. “I have the worst damn luck in choosing partners."

She is an attractive and vivacious woman, so how does this happen? It’s quite simple. She is blind-sided by romance, and never takes an honest look at her new objet d’ amour when she is in a state of lustful infatuation, but embraces the superficialities. It’s nothing to do with bad luck. It’s bad choices and a refusal to look deeper than the surface. I know about that. I’ve been there.

A short time ago, I took a personal inventory on my regrets today. I don’t dwell on them, but I still have them. I accept the fact that some of them will always be with me, and therefore they are aspects of the canvas of my life. Others may be remedied before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

What are they?

• I regret my two failed marriages. In both cases I’d made a commitment for life to my two wives. We had good moments, and some of the memories are still in the realm of the cherished. While there was fault on the other side in both cases, I regret my role and my poor decisions that had their place in contributing to the breakdown. On balance, in my current (and hopefully my last) marriage, I am very happy, and harbor a sense of contentment unequaled in my earlier years. If I knew then what I now know about relationships and what is important therein, would I still be in my first marriage? My wife asked me that the other day. I had to confess, I do not know. Maybe it would have run its course, regardless.
  
• I regret my estrangement from my stepdaughter. I loved her dearly as the only child I’d ever had in my life, and I take full responsibility for the things that drove us apart. I still care deeply for her, and do keep informed about how she is doing. Whether she is ever destined to reenter my life is an unknown and unknowable turn-of-events. My regret is tempered by the fact that she did teach me that there is another form of love apart from the romantic one.
  
• I regret that I didn’t fully explore whatever talents I might have, at an earlier age. There are areas I would like to explore, and wish I hadn’t wasted so much time. To what avail would it have been for me to have bitten the bullet and gone off in directions that terrified the hell out of me? I cannot know. At the end of the day, I am happy I have the talents I have, and right now I can only make use of the present-tense, so to hell with agonizing over the might-have-beens.
  
• I regret I didn’t make time to learn a little more about my dysfunctional parents and what they were all about. It might have led to more understanding, and have given me a greater capacity to move on at an earlier stage in my life.
  
• I regret some of the antics I indulged in during excesses of the past -- too much booze, and too much infidelity, and too much dishonesty. On the other hand, those things also became part of the picture of the broader adventure, and God help me if I didn’t learn from them. I think I did.
  
• And, kids, the one thing I regret more than most others is that I ever began to smoke fucking cigarettes. I thought chain-smoking Humphrey Bogart was very cool (I still do), but when Humphrey was my age, he was already dead. I’d like him to have been around a little longer.
  
• Finally, I regret that I took so long to find out the value of unconditional love and forgiveness. It would have saved me a great deal of distress if I’d embraced those two psychologically and spiritually healthy attitudes earlier in my life.

And so it goes. The choice is your own. You can wallow, or you can prosper in the present tense. I suggest moving on.

Of course, if you really work at the regret syndrome you can turn it into a way-of-life, and embrace a pattern of living that is always immersed in the past-tense. Then you get to turn mean and embittered, and become the sort of pain-in-the-ass who offends everyone he meets. The streets, rehab facilities and shrink-wards are filled with people who didn’t take pains to sort out their regrets.

On the other hand, there are people with absolutely Kafka-esque stories of past horrors who simply carry on by living in the moment. ‘Carpe diem’ is the key to it all, and it sounds so simple. It’s only too bad that it’s not.

But you can develop the skill by learning to dispel encroaching thoughts of shame and regret. You are where you are now, and if you want to exorcise some demons, then do something about it. Write about them. Talk to a counsellor. Talk to the person you may have offended by an earlier behavior. Be genuinely contrite and most of all, be absolutely honest.

You’ll never entirely lose your past tense, and that’s OK. But, you do not need to let it dominate your time present. If it’s doing that, you will never grow into the next stage of your being. That would be a pity.