Regret?! Regret these balls!

Time is running out.

Although I’ve said most of the things I wanted to say about regret, my mind keeps circling back to the subject. It might be because every 25-35 year old is constantly bickering that their life is over the moment they reach escape velocity and propel away from their adolescence.

Listen, I think it’s important to take stock of your life, examine your past and how it has influenced your future. Surely, the patterns that brought you to this moment are still inside your psyche and if you hope to change direction, you have to understand how they’re controlling you; the only way to find out is to look back. Right?

This process has nothing to do with regret, however. The lie you tell yourself, that you’re trying to learn from your mistakes by boiling in your own self-pity juices, hides how you want to hurt yourself; to self-sabotage, to grab the whip and self-flagellate until you bleed for the mortal sin of being human.

Worse, you’re using this punishment to protect yourself from even greater pain. Regret, in that sense, is but a protective mechanism, and the torture is how you divert your attention from a void you can’t bear to gaze even for a moment.

What’s that, you ask? Yes, you figured out:

It’s avoiding what you need to be doing in the present moment. That’s all regret is. It has nothing to do with the past or the future. It’s about the here and now.

You sit there, filled with grief about a wrong decision or multiple nondecisions that cost you an ounce or a pound of potential, and yet you’re totally unaware that everything is still available. The future is still waiting. It just stands on the other side of a bridge, and that bridge must be destroyed once you cross it. In fact, you must learn how to destroy all bridges. Bury a keg of Giant Powder right under the bents, split the wick, and touch a coal to it.

You must close all doors behind you as you move forward. The more you keep your options open, the more you’ll suffer from regret every day, paralyzed by your indecision. But it’s a sweet paralysis. It maintains the dream, the fantasy of the fake self, that one day you can have it all, and in having it all, you avoid everything. You’re lulled by the hypnotic song echoed in a potential utopia. The Edenic future. When it doesn’t come, it stings. Predictably. You knew all along that you were ruined. Now the past must warp itself in a way that validates your narrative. I’m sure that your life is this and that way because of a series of past events, 10 years ago.

Of course, if one looks carefully, they’ll realize that regret and avoidance are one and the same. The reason you don’t commit to life right now is the same reason that 2 years ago you didn’t do or did do the thing that you regret. Time, in the sense of having or not having it, isn’t a relevant parameter but a helpful way to add insult to injury. Time is only relevant in the waiting room. You lift your head and the clock is ticking and you know the world outside is moving on without you. Yet, you have to wait and as you wait, you regret every moment of it, but I promise once you step out of the waiting room, it doesn’t matter.

What I say is to regret these balls. One mustn’t judge one’s actions by their outcomes but by the reasoning behind them. One must only accept responsibility for what they caused, in others or themselves. Only then can they be liberated.

But you want atonement for your sins, not against a God or fellow man, but sins you committed against yourself, a past and a future self. Do you have it in your heart to forgive? Wait, take a moment. Think about it. Forgiving is the most difficult thing you can do. It’s not merely a decision, something you can simply declare and move on. To forgive means to forget. Forgetting will only occur if you accept, totally and unconditionally, who you are. Even if it means accepting just how broken you are.

You want to change. To become a different person. To self-improve. To become so perfect nothing will matter, nothing will be able to touch you. Safe and protected. Spiritually castrated, calcified, and not-human. Because that’s your only exit, the only escape from the person you are, a person who needs something from a reality that’s opaque and complicated. No one can change, really. You can't become someone other than yourself. No one can change the past, because there’s nothing there. You can return. Of course you can. You’ll find an empty house, empty road, coffee-stained paper, and fading memories, and you’ll be a ghost, grasping at other ghosts, eternally tormented being prisoners of your mind.

Self-harm, psychological as it may be, is what happens when you aren’t willing to accept responsibility. It just feels easier, to suffer, mulling over a distant, alien life, because it can be that in the recesses of your mind there’s a hidden belief that if you suffer enough, maybe someone, your parents, God, society, will reward you.

The child tugs their mother’s dress to get her attention. It cries and cries until it’s noticed and given candy. Fortunately, reality is more severe and nothing is given to those who lightly choke themselves. Responsibility is the essence of freedom. The paradox is that taking on more and more responsibility feels like a prison to those who always want to be in control and freedom to those who can let go. The latter accepts life’s tasks, while the former withers away trying to hide from them.

Unfortunately, freedom has always been more terrifying than people admit.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, whereas fear is a threat from the outside, anxiety is a threat from the inside. It is an autoimmune response of consciousness. When you refuse to acknowledge the guardrails of reality—that every choice necessarily destroys another—the mind invents its own limitations. Regret, namely.

“But I did ruin my life, Hyde. I weep, I weep like Julius Caesar wept because Alexander had already conquered the world by that age while he had achieved nothing memorable.”

A man feels ecstatic relief when he says, “I’m a piece of shit that ruined his life.” because in that moment, he’s free from the complexity of life; he no longer has to wrestle with ambiguity; he’s triumphantly free from responsibility, and that’s as addicting as taking drugs.

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Did you have enough already? It’s time to let go. What you think is wasted is but the present. And the present always springs anew.