What’s the
one thing in your life you’d like to do over?
What one mistake
would you like to correct?
Sound like easy
questions? Not so fast.
Like every
other human, I’ve made poor decisions, but I can’t think of a single one that
hasn’t led to something very good that I wouldn’t want to sacrifice with a
do-over.
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| Universal Pictures' Back To The Future movie trilogy warned us that changing one thing in time could have unintended consequences. |
For example, I
got married between my sophomore and junior years in college. Way too young. But,
after a few years, when we realized we wanted different things out of life, I
cried a lot but we parted friends. If it weren’t for that first brief marriage,
I never would have lived in Rochester, NY, and met my second husband. My second
marriage has now passed the 40-year mark so I think this one will stick!
Marrying my second husband was one of the very best decisions of my life.
Big mistake
number two? My husband and I bought a direct mail franchise. With this
business, I had to call on and try to collect money from small retail
customers. Too many of these business owners turned out to be drowning in debt
and barely hanging on to their stores. It’s the only job that has ever made me
cry. Yet my husband and I both learned computer and design skills that proved a
solid foundation for our future entrepreneurial adventures in public relations
and marketing.
There are
other things I’m sorry happened, but they weren’t really predictable. That makes it hard to classify them as regrets. For instance, we
thoroughly researched a builder before we started construction on a new house.
No way could we have predicted he’d decide to expand his operations, leave a less experienced crew in charge of our building project, and go
bankrupt before while we still had a variety of items on our punch list.
So my regrets
only revolve around small personal decisions. I’m sorry I ever smoked. I regret
that I’ve let my weight yo-yo over the decades.
But I don’t
dwell on these regrets. The older I get, the more I realize it’s now that
counts. What matters is spending time with people I love, doing what makes me
happy, and assigning all the other regrettable crap to the dustbin.
Writing is one of my joys. It also provides a vehicle to make good use of the regrettable circumstances we've lived through not to mention the encounters with unpleasant people we'd rather not have met. What fun to use the personalities of those unpleasant people to create fictional characters who will suffer a just fate.
4 comments:
As an author all of those "regrets/regrettables" can become fodder for a story, a series or just background on a character. I find it much easier to write the actions and emotions I've lived than the ones I haven't. Not impossible but definitely easier.
And sometimes we have to experience what we think is a good thing to learn that it isn't as good as we thought. I had a Japanese pen pal when I was in my early teens. I wanted to be a mom and have 9 boys and 1 girl (a baseball team of boys in other words). After one child (a boy) - actually even before I had my son - I'd pared that dream down to one or two - maybe 3 kids. In hindsight, I've no regrets that I parented one..
Agree completely, Judith. Some things that seem like good--great--ideas turn out to be good in the short-term but not long-term. And I have used a number of my regrettable decisions in my books.
Enjoyed your blog post, Linda. Since as the old sayin goes, "Life is stranger than fiction", I've got to agree using life experiences is definitely good fodder for stories. Have a great weekend.
Linda, you are right in that we can't change the past and the future is not a given. Focus on the now!
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