The Psychotic Psychologist

Many people seek to live life with no regrets. It’s certainly an appealing notion. Regrets can eat away at you, haunt you and hold you back. They range in scale from lost loves and failed careers to a poorly chosen word, but none are pleasant. So since we are all engaged in that endless pursuit of happiness, it makes sense that regrets would be on some people’s zero-tolerance list.

But how can one live life without regret? I can see two ways. The first, to avoid ever creating regrets. This is obviously a fruitless endeavour, most regrets are by their nature unforeseeable. Even if you succeeded in avoiding doing anything you could possibly regret, then there’s no doubt you’ll let a lot of good go by with the bad. Living life in fear of regret will stop you from ever properly living it at all.

The second and apparently more popular method is to deny your regrets. To refuse that many or all the things that you have done that others might consider foolhardy or reckless are actually regrettable. This method, even more so than the first, is fanciful. We all have made mistakes. None of us possess perfect judgement, but how can we hope to improve on faults that we ignore? 

Regrets are important. They are unavoidable and unpleasant, but they exist for a reason and that reason is to allow us to learn from our mistakes. Regrets must not be dwelt on, but nor can they be ignored. If you’re faced with regret, give it its due and no more. Think about why it is you have it, what mistake you made and why you made it. Then, you adjust your judgement accordingly. By calmly considering your failings, they can make you stronger rather than weaker.

They say you learn something new every day. Though I hold my reservations regarding who “They” are and just how rigorous their investigations were, I’ve personally found the saying has held water. And indeed, how could it not be true? We’re surrounded by a constantly changing world full of interesting people and new things happening and being discovered on a daily basis. Even practicing the questionable lifestyle choice of living under a rock that would be necessary for you to miss all these things would lead you to the discovery that living underneath a rock does indeed suck and has done your spinal health no favours.

But an interesting (or unnerving, or perhaps comforting, depending on how you look at things) phenomenon is that much of what is learned is that what you learned the day before was wrong. Particularly of late I’ve been finding how wrong I used to be about certain concepts and people. Don’t get me wrong, by and large this is a good thing. If you’ve never found that something you think or used to think is wrong, then you’re in for a surprise when you start examining what you believe. Nobody’s right all the time, and to think you are just adds to the problem.

Looking back we can see a host of things we used to fervently believe, but that in sober reflection appear ignorant or foolish. This presents a less ambiguously unnerving problem. What are you wrong about today? What do you currently believe that will one day make you hang your head and wonder “What was I thinking?”.

I went through a period when this terrified me. How can I possibly show confidence in my views, express and endorse them, when I have so often been so woefully wrong in the past? The answer is not the tempting (but paradoxically impossible) option to simply never voice an opinion again. Closing yourself in any way is harmful in this respect. Close your mouth, you remove the opportunity to be corrected. Close your mind, and it won’t help when you are.

So keep talking, keep listening, keep learning. You may be wrong today, but tomorrow holds new wisdom, and who are you to deny yourself something so good?

It is theorised by some (and doubted by surprisingly many) that occasionally, things happen. Due to the nature of the universe these things are rarely in the control of any conscious entity, or at least one we could hope to comprehend. So by and large, a majority of things are accidents. You and I and our entire lives are a culmination of billions upon billions of accidents, coincidences, happenstances and generally unlikely events. Nobody can hope to plan a life. As a cleverer man than me once said, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans”.

At many points in a life something will happen, as things tend to. It will seem a small thing at first. A glance at something new, a meeting with someone unknown, a pebble tumbling off a cliff into the ocean. Like all things that happen, it may compound with other small factors into something larger. A long look, a conversation, a ripple that will echo evermore.

And after some time that tiny little happenstance, nurtured by a host of others, may grow into something unrecognisable. As different from that first instance as the oak from the acorn, and just as grand. You won’t know it when it first happens. One cannot see the oak in every acorn, nor bring them all to grow. But if you wonder a little, if you take it upon yourself to give just one of them the chance to grow into the oak it could be, then one day you may sit by it and wonder at how you never missed its shade.

No-one can plan a life. But if you let it, life can have some great things in store for you.