Regret should be one of the deadly sins. Not because it keeps you from God, but because it keeps you from peace. Regret is a pocket full of stones…the more you collect, the harder it is to swim. Yet, it’s so easy to feel regret, isn’t it? We do things that we wish we hadn’t. We hurt others. We make poor choices. Remorse comes after we’ve done something wrong. We avoid taking chances. Regret comes from NOT doing something we wish we would have. It’s easy to get mired down wishing things would have happened differently. As my grandma used to say, wish in one hand and spit in the other. See which one fills up first. In other words…it’s useless to fill our hearts and minds with regret.

We waste so much emotional energy on things that we simply cannot change. If I have made a mess of things, and there is some way to make restitution, then that’s what I must do. After that, it becomes an experience and…hopefully…a lesson learned. The older I get, the easier it has become to let go of regrets. That doesn’t meant I have let go of every single one. There are two things that I regret. One is that I didn’t demonstrate faith to my children because I was fearful of it at the time. The second is that I did not insist Mr. Virgo have the tests done that his doctor wanted him to do. There are no do-overs in either department. The only thing I can do is live my best life, teaching by example. And feel the loss of my loved one knowing he was a stubborn man and I could not make him do anything. He was going to live his life on his terms, no matter what anyone else might say.

It does not pay to chase the winds of folly. We must apply ourselves to the understanding of wisdom and absorb the lessons learned. We are human. We are fallible. We do what we know. And when we know better, we do better.

❤

“Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind.”

Ecclesiastes 1:17 NIV