So, you want to have regrets?

There is moral dignity in regret. Regret implies that one has lived and made choices as sincere as they may have been foolish. To regret is to see one's own life as it is and in comparison with how it could have been. Regret, at least to some degree, is the necessary outcome of retrospective introspection, and everyone wants it. Don't believe me? Go to your local bookstore. Any title that purports to be the story of someone who "lived a life with no regrets" either is, or shortly will be, on the remainder table beyond the security alarms, begging to be taken. Look through your record collection or iTunes library, as the case may be. The late nineties and early 2000's were riddled with disposable music about a life with no regret. The eighties are defined by hedonistic music about living life to the fullest so as to avoid regret, all by musicians who now regret the drugs, pants, and hair. You get the idea.

Horace Walpole said that "life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think." We all know people who love to feel their feelings, and, generally, their feelings are hurt. We also know people who either exist in a perpetual state of cynicism or at least try to see the humor in even the most ardently stressful moments of their lives. The fact is that most of us fall somewhere in between. What Walpole fails to mention is that people are not so easily lumped into categories of "feelers" and "thinkers." Most of us think about our lives, and how we feel about them. The place where our thoughts and feelings collide is what we call regret. Invariably, when we consider the places we have been, we come across places where we were happier and wish we could get back, or where we weren't as happy as we thought we would be and wish we had never gone. This is not because each of us has some Aristotelean notion of the perfect life to which our own never quite measures up. It is not because the universe is cold and ambivalent. It is because we are not perfect. It is because, though we often claim to, we are not satisfied with the best. The humor in Voltaire's Pangloss is his obsessive search for "the best of all possible worlds," as he drives himself to death traipsing through the very world for which he is looking. There is no utopia. There is no world other than this. Yes, it is not perfect, but it is by far the best of all possible worlds, rife with doubt, grief, and regret.

Regret gets a bad rap. Anyone who shuns regret (or grief, or any other less-than-flowery feeling, for that matter) is missing the point. There are plenty of beings that do not regret, but, given the choice, I will take regret and grief over the alternative a million times out of a million. Regret and grief are the badges we wear as proof that we were here. They are the seeds we plant that bloom into hope and joy. Regret is the roadmap and grief the lantern we carry forth to avoid the pitfalls that have previously ensnared us- though they may way us down, we are lost without them.