Tempus fugit.
Time does fly. It’s already way past the middle of the semester. Sooner than we expect it, finals week would be around the corner. During times like these, I find myself stuck among a lot of random and not-so-random thoughts.
I really hope to graduate this coming March and I see this semester as a very crucial one. In fact the past years of my college life had all been crucial. Almost six years of being in the university taught me the importance of being prudent in making decisions about my academic life. Now that I’m getting near the so-called “finish line”, I would like to think that I’m making the most prudent choices.
Tension of opposites.
As course requirements pile up, I get to be tempted by Facebook and Twitter. As required readings get thicker, I get lured to watch a movie with my siblings. As reporting dates get closer, I get enticed to catch up on lost sleeping hours. Others may call it typical or even plain student weaknesses; I call it my perennial problems.
Thing is, I’m getting tired of this (seemingly but hopefully not incurable) sickness. It’s a vicious cycle that wears down my system. As much as I’m convincing myself that I know my priorities, my actions show otherwise. I’m really getting tired of my own attitude at times. I wish I could do better.
Regrets.
I came across an article entitled, “Don’t Regret Regret” written by Kathryn Schulz. It begins with a story of how Schulz regretted having a tattoo at the age of 29 made her regret it the moment she stepped out of the tattoo place. She had a massive emotional meltdown because of it. According to her, it shocked her big time because she prided herself on “having absolutely no regrets.” The tattoo experience taught her that “lamenting things in the past is an absolute waste of time.”
At this part of the article, I managed to tell myself, “Hey kiddo, are you taking this down?”
Schulz aptly defined regret as “the emotion we experience when we think that our present situation could be better or happier if we had done something different in the past.” She further enumerated the top six things (based on some researches) that most people regret in life: decisions pertaining to education (33%), career, romance, parenting, various choices about sense of self and how one spends (or fails to spend) his/her leisure time.
I absolutely get her point. What we regret are decisions we do about the things that we really care about. The choices we do in these areas of our lives terribly affect us. And for Schulz, we experience regret in four terrible ways. The first one is that of denial, and then a sense of bewilderment, followed by an intense desire to punish ourselves and the fourth phase would be perseveration where we focus on the same thing obsessively and repeatedly. These four phases create an infinite loop making us feel really miserable. Schulz, however, adds a fifth one and that she calls an “existential wake-up call.”
I guess this is the part where Hope enters the picture. The author moreover explained how we can be at peace with our regrets. First, we have to take some comfort at regret’s universality. It happens to all of us and we can't escape it. Then, we should learn how to laugh at ourselves. We should not take ourselves too seriously - we deserve a break. And lastly, we can make peace with our regrets through the passage of time. Time indeed heals all wounds.
Now, writing this post may or may not be something I would regret later, but I’ll take Schulz’ word for it: “We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesn’t remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we know we can do better.”
