Mine is that I did not get a chance to have a deep talk with my father as an adult, and to tell him goodbye before he died.
He took a cold stance toward me when I got married and then when I left being near him, and the distance and maturity made me have a whole new perspective on our relationship. I hate that I reacted negatively to his cold stance and acted cold too.
He had once told me as a teenager that one of the most hurtful things in his life was that one his father’s deathbed his father refused to hug him or say he loved him, instead saying in response to him saying I love you that his father blandly said “I love all my children”.
He died suddenly and I was far away, when I was told he was dying he was in a coma and he passed away less then twelve hours later. I was upset for a long time at my mom and the circumstances of his death but that wasn’t really on him, he had sepsis and was delirious and I’ve mostly gotten over it.
I just wish I had 60 minutes to talk, ask some questions and say I love you dad and appreciate all you did for me.
I have lived a short-ish life so far, and I also am not a risk-taker of all, but the first thing that came to mind is also the thing that’s my biggest accomplishment.
Not cheating on my (then, now ex) girlfriend with a married co-worker
Biggest accomplishment is obvious since she was throwing herself at me, and was super super super hot, but I am NOT a cheater and never will be.
The regret part is three fold: Not sleeping with an extremely hot girl who wanted me, not having that…story…I guess…to tell to people and not have that life experience, and then said ex-girlfriend eventually cheated on me and hurt me real bad…and it feels like I, in retrospect, deserved to cheat on her with hot co-worker.
So it’s a weird mix of biggest regret and biggest accomplishment rolled into one. But it answers your question
I regret not having learned to read my other language when young. Now in my 20s, I’m still illiterate in that language and find it almost impossibly difficult to learn.
I was already engaged to my then girlfriend. And right then, right there, there was this great woman. We met, and we clicked. It was absolutely incredible.
I resisted to the utmost, and in the end, with a great effort of will, put myself apart from this person, for I felt that if I stayed near her I would be putting my impending marriage at risk.
I regret not being braver and not having stopped the engagement then and there, and not going with this other woman. I got married to my then girlfriend, and the marriage ended up being disastrous. There were big issues between us which had not appeared before, and which ended up driving us to divorce.
I still regret and wonder – what is of that other woman now? I do not have her contact details (I got rid of them) and I live far away from her now. But I cannot help thinking that, if I had been braver then, chances are everybody involved would be happier now.
I’ve been pretty blessed in my life, but I still regret being an idiot kid when I was 10. My grandmother was dying of lung cancer, and I was trying to deal with that in whatever way a 10 year old deals with that, and I did a pretty poor job of it.
We went to visit her in the hospital, and on our way to the room, we passed a patient on a gurney with the sheet over them being wheeled to the morgue. As a 10 year old confronted with death, I somehow tried to make light of this, and after chatting for a bit with my grandmother, I brought up that we had seen someone who died being wheeled down.
As if that weren’t enough, I somehow thought joking, “Yeah, and he died of cancer!” would lighten the mood (or make me feel better, or something…frankly, I have no idea why that though entered my brain.) My grandma was fine when I brought up the dead guy, but was visibly rattled when I said the cancer part, and I immediately felt like the little piece of crap I was that day. I apologized, but that was the last day I ever saw her alive, and I have forever regretting scaring the hell out of her on a day that should have been about loving family.
Interesting question, I find I lack the ability to reflect on that and answer honestly. My brain seems to bounce off each issue I approach. I have plenty of significant regrets involving investments I almost made, relationships I almost had, an education I didn’t get, job promotions turned down etc. The biggest ones seem much more personal and best not disturbed.
I’m really pretty happy with my life these days, so I don’t have many regrets. A couple of falling-outs (fallings-out?) along the way that ended a couple of friendships I miss, and I regret having never learned to play a musical instrument. (Not gonna happen anytime soon, either, since an active 7 year old eats into the time for things I want more badly than that.)
Well, life is like playing poker. You size up the odds, and play your cards as well as you can. For any given hand, you might win or lose. But if you play the game right, in the long run, you’ll come out ahead.
The only choices worth regretting are those where you made a poor decision. Sure, sometimes a good decision can lead to a bad outcome. But when you add everything up, a lifetime of good decisions will see you end up ahead more often than a lifetime of bad ones.
So, look at your actions, not at the outcome. If you made the best choice you could with the information you had available, then there’s nothing to regret. And although I don’t know the specifics of the situation, it sounds like you did OK in this case. Risking one’s marriage for a fling will probably end badly more often than not.
I left my first teaching job to move back to Texas. I wanted to be closer to my friends and brother, but once getting back, I couldn’t find another teaching job. What was supposed to be six months living with a friend so I could save up for a house turned out to be four years of never making ends meet. When I did get a teaching job, it was for a nightmare district. My health crashed. I took a beating in just about every way possible that I haven’t really recovered from.
There would have been problems if I’d stayed, but I think I could have managed much better.
Not continuing my education sooner in life. Yes, I’m still relatively young and I’ll have my master’s degree in about a year, but I regret not completing it sooner.
Not bailing my SO out of jail before ICE got him. I had the money but I wanted to “teach him a lesson” because his drinking had gotten out of control. The regret is not for my sake but for his and our daughter’s. We had a rough life together but he didn’t deserve what happened and neither did she.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about regrets. They are funny things. I’ll start to say to myself, “I regret marrying [my last spouse],” but realize that, if I hadn’t married him and been miserable and found other activities to cope with that misery, I wouldn’t have the horses or friends I have today. So, while I wish I hadn’t had to go throught that awful time, it turned out okay. I suspect, but could never prove, that it might be true for all my regrets. big and small.
When I first read **Martian Bigfoot’s **post, I disagreed with him.
“Well, life is like playing poker. You size up the odds, and play your cards as well as you can. For any given hand, you might win or lose. But if you play the game right, in the long run, you’ll come out ahead.”
(Bolding mine.) This sounded a bit Pollyanna-ish to me, especially the last sentence. I’m not sure you always do come out ahead, but I have so far.
I’m sorry, grude, that you didn’t get a last chance to talk to your father.
Sometimes it’s one thing, sometimes another; stuff I did, stuff I didn’t do… At this very moment it’s that I didn’t roger my college girlfriend much more often.
I apologize if my post came out sounding optimistic. I don’t mean that things will always end up honky-dory at the end of the day, or that things necessarily work out for the best. If any of you have totally screwed your lives up, I sympathize, and I certainly don’t want to take that away from you.
I’m just saying that in picking your regrets, you have to be a bit blind to outcomes. If you’re making good decisions, based on the available data, then that’s what you’re doing. It’s pointless to regret crossing the street on a green light, even if a colorblind truck driver does run you over. “Oh, I shouldn’t have done that!” Um, yeah, you should have, even if the result was a disaster. Similarly, you may cross on red lights your entire life and never have an accident, but it doesn’t mean that it’s fundamentally a good idea.
The only thing you can control is your actions. The rest is just the world working itself out.
Sounds sad.
