“Live your life without regret.” A common refrain from advice givers. It’s a tempting attitude to adopt. There seems to be two ways to go about it:
If you define regret merely as sadness or disappointment over something that has happened, you can simply chose not to be sad or disappointed. If you become a paraplegic, you can choose to view it as something that happened, even something you wish had happened differently, but not view it with sadness. Follow this mantra, and, by definition, you can live without regret.
Or, you can be proactive, attempting to avoid regret during the decision making process. Because such an attitude requires quite a bit of forethought for nearly every decision, it probably leads to a happier, or at least more successful, life.
Since most regrets stem from not taking action, the proactive choice should lead us to say yes to more opportunities. Even if we almost always make great decisions, embracing a lifetime of opportunities will inevitably result in some failures. And, while failures are in themselves not regrettable, some of them almost certainly will have the potential to be.
And that’s fine. You will definitely have regrets. Try to minimize those regrets, by confining them to less important aspects of life, and life will be much better than if you avoided those opportunities altogether.
Of corse, there’s nothing stopping you from adopting both approaches.
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