I want to talk about a plot point from the classic 1936 American novel, Gone with The Wind.
In the book, Gerald O’Hara, the father of the main character Scarlett O’Hara, is madly in love with his wife, Ellen. Ellen, however, when she was young, fell deeply in love with Philippe Robillard, her cousin who would go on to meet an untimely death.
When Ellen is on her deathbed, she gets taken over by a deep hallucinating fever and screams out Philippe’s name as she passes away. In her final moments, Ellen’s mind is bombarded with the sweet memories she had when she was but a young girl, a deeply regretful loss in her life that she never recovered from.
Titanic (1997) gives Rose the same affliction — still tortured by the death of Jack Dawson, a boy she only knew for a couple of days 84 years ago; who entered her life like a ray of light during uncertain times; who showed her love when all she had known was the condescension of her spiteful husband.
As they say, the first cut is indeed the deepest.
While Margaret Mitchell and James Cameron may have intended Ellen and Rose’s stories to be testaments to undying romantic love, it is not the only emotion that can have such a profound impact on one’s psyche.
Everyone has someone or something that they lament missing out on — a “the-one-that-got-away”.
It can be a person, the time that you had that is now gone forever, or something you wanted to achieve that is impossible now.
For the romantic types, it can be “puppy love” — that one person who had the most lasting impression on them when their hormones were in full swing.
For the ambitious types, it can be the failure to meet a life goal that they had staked their entire happiness on.
For many, it is the untimely death of a friend or family member, truly one of the harshest ways in which life can thrust its brutality at you.
You can have all the money, awards, followers, and respect in the world and all of that can be inconsequential — a blip in the matrix — if you are really hung up on something that has already come to pass.
Something that the sands of time dictate you no longer have control over.
It is a deep hole that you can fall into with no obvious way to pull yourself out of.
Regardless of all that you go on to achieve in your life after that moment, this unfulfilled desire can tear at your heartstrings forever, commanding you, consciously or subconsciously, for the rest of your life.
I’m no different.
Now, I’m not going to pour out all the things I wish I had done differently in my life, but rest assured, I’ve certainly made enough mistakes to feel the sting of wishing I had done something differently.
It sucks.
But here’s the kicker — by changing the way you look at it, you can free yourself from its grasp and look forward to a brighter day tomorrow.
This closure, to put your past life to rest, comes by answering one question — did I have control over the situation that I now regret?
There can be one of two answers –
- It was a real possibility that I messed up due to my actions.
- It was never possible in the first place.
Both these answers, though contradictory to each other, can be comforting with the right mindset.
If the answer is a yes, that you indeed did make a mistake, you can chalk it up to immaturity or unpreparedness.
Then you can mentally transform that regret into just another life lesson — something you had to learn from to get to where you are right now.
If the answer is no, then you can rest easy knowing that it was the wrong time, the wrong place, or the wrong person for it to have worked out the way you wanted.
This can be a liberating feeling too.
Regret then becomes nothing more than a cruel twist of fate that you were powerless against — just another random event triggered by the entropy of the universe.
But this is where I want you to take a step back and notice something — how both answers are fundamentally different in the perspectives they encourage.
The first answer comes from a positive mindset. Though mistakes were made, we are ready to learn from the mistakes and make sure we don’t make them again. If we were to look at it negatively, we could fall into the trap of calling the grapes sour.
The second answer comes from a resigned, pessimistic mindset. Sometimes it is just easier to let go of something that was never meant to be rather than desperately clinging on to it with hope. If we try to be optimistic about things out of our control, we may delude ourselves into thinking that we can change the future to make peace with our past.
So, whatever answer we choose for ourselves should change based on our judgment of how much control we feel we once had over a situation. And, consequently, our perspective should be flexible enough to change based on that judgment.
I concede that, at first, grappling with either answer can be a disheartening feeling. But I ask you to give it some time.
Time heals, definitely, but only with the right frame of mind.
And we must change the way we look at our pain, with either optimism or pessimism, based on what that pain is.