We all live with them; these silly little things that we
bury deep inside of our hearts and of our minds called regrets. At times, we regret
things we say, but all too often, we regret the things we didn’t say far more.
We ache over the times
we didn’t say “I love you” for the first time, or for the last.
We regret not having
the opportunity for that final goodbye after the first hello.
We are contrite for
not saying we are sorry, and then losing the opportunity to do so forever.
We mourn losing
the people we have lost, the people we allow to pass through our fingers; the
people that our own stubbornness and ego forced us to let go of...until they
just aren’t around anymore.
Our regret deepens, and we realize that we loose people; we miss opportunities not by choice, but because of our own rebellious nature.
We live in retrograde, when we should be living out in the open.
If we are lucky, we realize that in these short blips of
existence we are granted, we take in the simple fact that life is not infinite.
We come to the realization that this crazy little thing called “time” is quite constrained.
Not a single one of us has forever. But, even deeper than that, we realize that
not a single one of us is guaranteed tomorrow.
Which led me to ask myself a poignant question: If we
don’t have forever, why is it that we insist on acting as if we do? How do we
know that “things will be better tomorrow” if we have no guarantee that we will
not expire before we wake? -- I know, it’s
tad morbid, but stick with me on this.
Yet, even in the wake of such blasphemous epiphanies, we
have morphed into a generation of “waiters”. We wait for the right moment, the
right person, the perfect time. We declare that everything in our limited rear
views conform to our even more limited belief systems. We put too much stock in
what other people say and too little in what we have to say for ourselves. We
question everything we think, and even what we don’t. We consume (and are inundated
with) so much information -- and, dare I say misinformation -- that we “think”
we are making informed decisions when, in fact, we are making anything but; or,
at the very least, decisions not true to own hearts.
Despite all of this knowledge, all of this deeply rooted truth,
we wait. We wait for things to happen, when we should be proactively making things
happen. We wait ourselves right into a deep well of personal regret. At the end
of the day, we regret the places we didn’t go, the things we didn’t see, the
apologies we didn’t make, the forks in the road we stood upon too long at the
corridor of question marks.
But sadly, we shut off that regret and turn to an
everlasting ‘hope’ for tomorrow, when tomorrow is not promised. We band aid all
of our own personal brands of remorse and compunction with positive updates,
assurances to friends and family that we are “okay” and by replying to those we
keep at arm’s length by saying, “everything is great”, when the truth is that ‘everything’
is often anything but. Yet we keep so disgustingly untrue to ourselves for the
sake of remaining in the safety of the status quo with society; for no better
reason than the desire to fit in and be accepted. We become such slaves to our
own insecurities that our voice becomes still, quiet and mute.
For what?
We don’t do what makes us happy. We do what makes everyone
around us happy, accepting and content with our behavior and our actions. For
what reason though? Why do we insist on conformity, even if it comes at our own
detriment?
After all, why are we
trying so hard to fit in, when we were born to stand out?
Be bold, be daring, be brave, be you. Be the person who
says, “This is my choice, you can either stand with me or choose to get out of
my way.”
For those are the people who are remembered. Those are the
people who live. Because a life lived full of regrets, really isn’t much of a
life at all.
As always, I welcome your comments and opinions -- as long as they don’t suck! Have a fantastic rest of the week, my dear readers.
Now, I want to know, what’s YOUR deepest regret?
Lovingly,
Miss Adventures
Fittingly the
song I chose for the ‘Soundtrack of Life’ today is all about regrets; the times
you “almost” but you didn’t.
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