On Regret

I've been thinking a lot about regret the past few days. Mainly I've been thinking about people I decided to cut out of my life ten years ago. I thought I was doing it for good reasons, and I think I probably made the best decision I could at the time. But here's what I regret. I regret that at 23 I never considered that when you stop talking to someone, you lose time and conversations with that person, and that loss might one day be painful and will most likely not be time you can make up for. I regret that for the past ten years I've been having dreams about talking with these people, but I never tried getting back in touch.

I don't know if I would have done anything differently and I certainly don't think I could have expected a different outcome if I had done something else. Aa said recently that regret's just a movie you play yourself, a movie of events that don't have much connection to the way things actually are. I kind of like that way of looking at it. And thinking about it that way, as well as reflecting on my feelings and asking what it is I really regret, makes me feel better. Or at least it makes me feel less heavy. And that's good.