Regrets, we have a few...
Today I decided to go on facebook to check out the lives of my friends who are on exchange/studying overseas. Yes, voyeurism. Because a picture paints a thousand words, I perused their photo albums and found many many exciting cross-cultural experiences and beautiful scenery that I will probably never get to see in my life- for many reasons. It saddens me to think that I could have gone that path, yes, two roads diverged in a yellow wood, but it really doesn't matter anymore. I stood in the school corridor chatting to 2 of my friends and we were lamenting for a short while our sad existence in law school, and having, in the words of one, an "existential crisis".
I suppose all of us have regrets. Too many to count or remember. Didn't try out for that drama audition, didn't take part in that competition, didn't choose that school, didn't pursue that interest when we were younger, didn't ask that girl out to a movie while she was still single. But as we grow older the regrets become weightier, more significant- didn't apply for that job, didn't marry that decent guy who showed interest, didn't question life and existence till we were 80, didn't go for that health screening, didn't have children till it was too late.
Why do we regret? I was asking myself that and unable to comprehend the magnitude of my own query. It's a reflection of something deeper, something more concrete, perhaps. I think it's a wrangling discontent with our circumstances and an avenue of venting our inability to control these very circumstances. We regret because we do not understand the real implications of the decisions that we made at present. We do not understand that perhaps the "better" must be disguised in the drab and dullness, and that the grass is always greener on the other side for the person who hates his life for now and always.
Regret is dark, regret is pain unbridled, regret is anger, self-pity. But regret can also be solace. Solace to the one who is a reverse optimist, and a short glimpse of an oasis past in an unforgiving desert. Difference from hope is that regret's oasis is gone, annihilated, forever.
And so it's hard, accepting the consequences of your own decisions. Your very own! But we're all going to have to. And I wanted to tell my 2 friends, thank you, I will not exchange the friendships I made this Semester for any overseas study experience. Beautiful scenery starts with delectable company. All things happen for a reason.