Regrets? Not Exactly

By Linda Lovely

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.

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.