What do we do when we mess up?

Sure, sure, to err is human. To think that a human will never make a mistake is, well, worth a visit to the loony bin to get your head checked.

Edith Piaf sang "Non, je ne regrette rien," yes, but that is rhetorical, I would think.  I cannot imagine a life without regrets whatsoever.  I prefer the Sinatra lines of "regrets, I've had a few."

An important part of our existence is about us dealing with our own decisions that do not work out well.A decision is, after all, nothing but a variation of the fork-in-the-road metaphor.  If the road we take does not work out, or even if it works, wondering about the road that we did not take, means that the longer we live the more we might have reasons to regret.  Like even a relatively obscure one of how the fifteen-year old me messed up the interview that led with the simplest of questions: what is the maximum value of the tangent function?

How do we deal with them?  Or, am I overly concerned about all such issues, instead of simply watching football and burping up the chips and soda?

I like the way the author of this essay (ht) phrases it:

In a culture that believes winning is everything, that sees success as a totalising, absolute system, happiness and even basic worth are determined by winning. It’s not surprising, then, that people feel they need to deny regret — deny failure — in order to stay in the game. Though we each have a personal framework for looking at regret, Landman argues, the culture privileges a pragmatic, rationalist attitude toward regret that doesn’t allow for emotion or counterfactual ideation, and then combines with it a heroic framework which equates anything that lands short of the platonic ideal with failure. In such an environment, the denial of failure takes on magical powers. It becomes inoculation against failure itself. To express regret is nothing short of dangerous. It threatens to collapse the whole system.

I like even more the following observation:

Great novels, Landman points out, are often about regret: about the life-changing consequences of a single bad decision (say, marrying the wrong person, not marrying the right one, or having let love pass you by altogether) over a long period of time.

I would not have thought about all my go-to-novels that I end up re-reading for comfort, but now that I think about them, yes, they deal with regrets of various types.  Those wonderful works of literature then provide me with the cathartic outlet for my own regrets.  As I wrote only a few months ago,

In addition to living a relatively lucky life, it is also because to a large extent I have made my peace with the regretful decisions, which might not seem anything big at all to an outsider looking at my life.  But, small or huge, our regrets are our own regrets.

 With every passing day, that list of small and huge regrets gets longer.  But, the good thing is that those regrets do not keep me awake.