Okay friends, for today’s Thoughtful Thursday post I wanted to talk about regret. We all to a certain degree have regrets in life. I am someone who truly tries to not live with regret. If I have those thoughts of regret pop up, I remind myself of a principle I believe in: that things happen for a reason. As you age, it gets easier to see the big picture of life. You may question why you made the decisions you made that you regret, or worse yet why things have happened to you because of chance or other people’s choices. But I truly think there is a big picture story happening in our lives that is hard to understand.

Another thing I do when I have feelings of regret is shift my mindset around it because regret can be a great learning experience for us. If we evaluate the regretful decisions we made, they can inform decisions we make moving into our future. Unfortunately time machines have not been invented, so we are not able to go back and make different choices. All we can do is make better choices moving forward. When we embrace this mindset shift, we can learn to forgive ourselves for past mistakes, and to give ourselves grace for not being perfect. It can be hard to forgive ourselves, but it’s necessary so we can move forward in life and view these regrets as lessons instead of dwelling on them.

Oftentimes with regret, it FEELS regretful because it is pricking some value we have and that decision didn’t align with that life value. I believe we will live more fulfilling lives when we make decisions that are truly in line with what we say we value. Sometimes we just give lip service to certain values, but our behavior and choices don’t reflect that value. So, if you have a regret, really evaluate why you feel regretful and what value it’s pricking. What can you do today in the present, and moving forward to better align with those values?

Regrets can be a great teacher to us, but also those decisions you made, while they may have been wrong they are leading you towards something better. Sometimes I can sit and think about the butterfly effect and it can really boggle my mind! I’m sure many of you know what this concept is, but basically it is the idea that the world is deeply interconnected and one small occurrence can affect a much larger complex system. This term was originally coined by meteorologist and mathematician, Edward Lorenz in the 1960s. In his scientific findings, he learned that weather predictions are often not accurate because of this idea. He suggested that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings represented the tiny change in the atmospheric condition that could change the trajectory of the weather. In the same way, some small change or different decision in our lives could cause a totally different outcome.

Hopefully I’m not getting too far off track here, basically I bring up this idea of the butterfly effect to demonstrate that perhaps we all have a path that was supposed to happen, so we should not live with those regrets. This idea reminds me of that Jim Carrey movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Have you ever seen that movie? It’s an older movie, but it is so good! There are a lot of psychological ideas around relationships explored in this movie, but one is this idea of what is meant to happen will happen in the end. The basic premise of this sci-fi type movie is a couple faces struggles and they decide to go through this procedure of erasing their minds in order to deal with the pain of the relationship so they will forget about one another. But somehow they keep returning to each other and falling in love all over again.

I hope this chat today encouraged you to look at regret differently. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments! What are your thoughts on regret?