regrets
I had a lot on my mind as I was leaving work today. I’ll warn you now, this is a hellaciously long post.
So, as I was saying, I had a lot on my mind when I left work today. I was mentally berating myself over a financial decision I made several months ago, and today I had to spend some time dealing with the consequences of that decision, which made me less than happy. I will likely be dealing with the consequences of that decision on and off for some time to come also, which makes me less than happy also. Hindsight being what it is, I know now that I made a huge mistake in this particular decision, but at the time, it seemed like the best, and possibly only option open.
Now I have to ask you to bear with me for minute, because I’m going to go off on a tangent for a while, just like my thoughts did, but if you stay with me, I promise I’ll tie it all together. It’s just going to take a bit. So, there I am, walking out of the building, and I look to see if the flags have been taken down for the day. And on the way out the door, I’m passed by a security guard on the way in, who could have taken down the flags but didn’t. In the parking lot, not far from the flags, is the security truck. I’m walking down the front of the building towards my car, thinking about how much security there is, and how it could potentially be circumvented, and suddenly I’m thinking about how afraid these people are of danger, real or imagined. For those of you who don’t know, I work for a company that does business with the federal government, and there are regulations in place about required security precautions because of 9/11 and the Patriot Act and all that garbage.
So i’m walking along, thinking about shades of Oklahoma City, and how paranoid do you have to be to think someone would actually consider you a viable target for terrorism anyway? Then I find myself thinking about death, and how of all the stupid things I worry about, that isn’t one of them, because when it’s my turn to go, I’ll go, regardless of where I am or how much ’security’ is around me, and the same is true for everyone else. Then I’m thinking, when I do go, however many years away that is, it’ll be with no regrets. Except that wouldn’t have been entirely true. I was regretting the decision I made a few months ago. There have been a few things in my life I’ve done that I’ve regretted.
Close on the heels of that came the other side of the argument. Every regret was the result of a mistake or decision I made, or let someone else make. But if I hadn’t done things exactly the way I did them, when I did them, I wouldn’t have become the person I am today, and frankly, I like who I am today. Would I have done things differently then if I knew then what I know now? Quite likely. But I can’t, so it’s really a moot point. And again, if I had done them differently, I would not be where I am nor would I be the person I am now. And my mood lifted. A lot.
Which got me to thinking about mistakes and how we, as people, learn. If you’re not tired of reading yet, I suggest at this point you read Paul Graham’s excellent essay, ‘Is it worth being wise?‘ I say that because I was thinking about how he differentiates wosdom from intelligence, which is more valuable and why. Then I started thinking about how people become wise and/or intelligent in the first place: mistakes. Which some people regret.
But it raises some interesting questions and ideas for me. It occurred to me that nature’s default method of learning is trial and error. Many of our basic motor skills are learned this way when we’re a child: crawling, standing, walking, running, learning to tie our shoes, feeding ourselves, the list is practically endless. Then we get sent to school to learn things where we’re taught things that have been distilled through trial and error for centuries. After we finish school, we go off into the world, to make our way again, often through the trial and error of trying to figure out how it all works. What if it were ok to make mistakes? What would education be like if someone said, hey, maybe school isn’t the most effective means for teaching or learning. What methods of learning could we discover if we explored the possbilities? It would seem like after all these years that as creative as humans are, we’d find a better way to learn than the default way of trial and error.
Which brought me back to the whole issue of regrets. Regrets are mistakes that we won’t let go of. Mistakes are our primary learning source…if we learn how to learn from our mistakes. So yeah, there are a couple things that I do realy wish I hadn’t done, or had done, as the case may be, but regrets? I don’t think so. I may have to live with the consequences of my decisions, mistakes and all, but I’m ok with that. As I said, I like who I am, and I wouldn’t be who I am if I didn’t make those mistakes. I didn’t like making them, but at least I learned from them.