I think there is at least one point in every person’s life that they feel like they messed It up. Of all the shared emotions in the collective social conscience, I think regret might just be the strongest and most evocative of them all.

Sure there are those people that allegedly never look back. Maybe they truly don’t, I dunno. But as animals outfitted with logic and memory, I find it hard to deny that our survival instincts seemingly force us to learn from the past. So for argument sake, let us just agree for now that everyone indeed is reflective and has some capacity for regret.

Inescapable and inevitable, each of us knows the feeling, the pang in your gut, from the friendship you let die, the kiss you never took, the conversation you never started and the questions you left unanswered. The seduction of the peer pressure. The words you wish never left your lips and the ease with which you gave in to it all. What if you had not chosen ‘b’ over ‘a’ – where would it all be now? To hell with hindsight because that doesn’t change the choices that you’ve made up until now. And now you have to live with it, like it or not.

Regret, basic in it’s universality, is in truth quite a binding force if you think about it. Many people’s lives are spent clouded by the overwhelming dimness of remorse, the daily torture of remembering and reliving it all over again. And not only does this mourning tie them down to their transgressions, but also to one another. We share this common connection with one another, if in silence only. Exploring the source of regret, we find that at a base level, we are motivated by both fear and necessity when we make decisions. We blindly hope (and assume?) that we’ve chosen correctly. But regret is the inevitable byproduct of simply having to choose ‘a’ over ‘b’ in the first place.

However, to me what is most intriguing is how each of us deals with our regrets. We’ve established that the emotion is inescapable, and thusly how one copes with this sentiment is the deciding factor of how we move forward in life. It is almost as if our futures are determined not by the decisions we make today, but rather how we digest what we’ve done wrong in the past.

It goes without saying that many are paralyzed by fear, by this regret. These among us simply do not move on, they just exist, persecuting themselves daily for what they’ve done. No growth, no closed chapters. Just life as a broken record of memories I suppose.

Then there are others who instead choose ignorance, as it is true that forgetting seems like an easy solution to pain. I would argue here that these among us are indeed worse off than those paralyzed by regret, as they are simply delaying the inevitable. Come hell or high water, those emotions will surface at some point.

Then there are others that are fueled by the questions of “what if?” In an ever-present quest to get things right, they try unfailingly to not let history repeat itself, to not be wrong again. In fact, their decision-making abilities can become easily colored by this infatuation with perfection of judgment.

And finally, there are those that deal with their lifetime of cumulative regret, fear and doubt by accepting the Eternal Longing. They move forward because they must, but they will always look over their shoulder. True, they wonder if they made the right choice, but moreso they long to know what it would have all felt like to be different. More paramount than perhaps the choice itself, these people simply yearn for the knowledge, the answer to the uncalculated equation. It should be noted that they are not necessarily unhappy with where their choices have gotten them thus far. Though technically I suppose this removes the regret from it all, simply leaving wonder or perhaps just doubt. Is it possible to be regretful of something without necessarily wanting the outcome to be different? I’m not sure, but all I know is that the longing is indeed intense and unrelenting.

So for those roads not taken, the “what ifs” and the ending to stories that we’ll never finish, I suppose we must all just learn to accept it…whatever your definition of acceptance really is.