Change may be in the air. After seven weeks of strict curfew there are indications the state is ready to gamble with uncertainty by easing restrictions. So, while the state and its scientists play dice with our collective health and while the news reports on whatever is the latest version of the state-approved truth, the time seems ripe to take advantage of the ending of the quiet and the calm. A storm may be on the way.
Before a storm, perhaps some cumulative curfew reflections. In the time spent sitting still over the past five weeks it has been a journey of traveling back in time with old pictures and long buried memories. Funny what the mind remembers and the heart forgets. Old pictures show eager eyes unable to see what was to come. Would she have been better off knowing? Would she have made the same choices? The twinkle in the eyes seem hopeful yet also cautious in embracing moments of fleeting happiness. Maybe she knew without understanding.
I’ve tried to live my life without regrets. At least it’s an axiom that seems cliche in its familiarity to me. But as with the best-laid plans, life objects to any attempt to place it within a box. So I ponder. Is the difference between a reflection and a regret simply time? Do regrets become reflections over time as years bring wisdom? Do reflections become regrets in time as years bring an awareness of the clock running out? Who or what decides? Can life be lived with one and not the other? Which version of life is preferable?
Let’s start with regrets. I regret being afraid for most of my life. Afraid of the future, afraid to try new experiences, afraid to say yes when life presented opportunities. I regret chances that will never come again, friendships that fell by the wayside, grand and ordinary things that went quietly into the abyss unsaid, undone, unexperienced. I regret suffering mental and physical health issues in solitude. I regret that film minor I never pursued. I regret cowering behind uncontrollable circumstances. I regret carrying guilt for actions that were not mine despite what the law said. I regret the forgotten good times, the laughs that don’t echo through time, the smiles in photographs that don’t seem real to me now because the memories have faded. I regret seeing pictures as purely falsehoods. I regret not believing.
Then there are reflections that perhaps should be regrets but are not. I don’t regret the pilgrimage to the desert that broke and changed me. I don’t regret making new friends who are more like family; I don’t regret letting go of family who had become strangers. I don’t regret seeing a therapist when life became too hard. I don’t regret being yelled at and failing in court on my first try. I don’t regret staying the course when I had to and changing course when I didn’t. I don’t regret giving up while not giving in. I don’t regret coming home.
Joseph Conrad once wrote, “it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of ones’s existence—that which makes its truth, it’s meaning—it’s subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible.” Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps it is this impossibility that keeps us straddling between reflections and regrets not knowing which marks our time in the epochs of our lives. Not knowing because we can never know but wanting to nevertheless.
As we lived in an ambivalent futuristic society where capitalism was put on life support while politicians argued, elites fundraised out of boredom by asking the jobless for donations, people became sick and died, and the earth healed itself, I tried to recall the past. Maybe in the hope that the past held answers to questions both asked and yet to be asked. When should course be changed again, if at all? Will I know when the time comes even if there may not be another spirit quest? But then again if Conrad is right it isn’t that the past holds answers because it never could. Settling into the idea that even with careful evaluations of reflections and regrets of the past, epochal life meanings cannot ever be known is what ultimately seems quite impossible.