Let it go ...

Frank Sinatra famously sang in My Way:

Regrets, I've had a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption

Too few to mention?  Really?

I have had a mediocre life and I have plenty of regrets.  Sinatra with too few regrets?

Given his life, Sinatra was no saint.  Which means:

“People who say ‘I regret nothing’ are either saints or stupid, in my view. Regret based on flexible attitudes is the hallmark of mental health. It is a sign that you are engaged with life.” Without regret, we cannot learn from our mistakes, and we are destined to repeat them

Humans that we are, all of us walk around with regrets.  (Unless it is this guy, but then he is a sociopath!)  The question then is what to do with those bags and bags of regrets.

Use them to understand who you really are. Know thyself!

It is the ability to accept yourself, to recognise that there was a wider context to your actions and to understand that you made the decisions you made based on the values and the information you had at the time, that leads to remorse and self-knowledge. Dryden says: “Take the psychological equivalent of cod liver oil, which doesn’t taste nice but will do you good: accept the point, difficult to swallow though it may be, that yes, it would have been nice if you had made a different choice, but you could only have acted as you did at that time in those circumstances.”

And, therefore,

“regret, though it’s very painful, can be a gift. It can be the doorway to a better way of living, of being with others.”

Indeed!