Regret. Yes, that’s what I was supposed to be writing about this week. Funny thing, I actually had to look back at my first blog about “the big three” to remember what the third one on the list was. Kind of regret that. Yes, that was my lame attempt at cracking a joke. Hope you don’t regret reading this. Okay, I’ve really got to stop and get to the serious stuff.

Regret, there it is. The last of “the big three”. When I look back on my life, there are a lot of things I regret. The big one that comes to mind is adopting my husband’s sense of humor. But there are plenty of others, so, I thought I’d make a top ten list of my biggest regrets in life.

My Top Ten Regrets

10. Buying glasses in the third grade that matched Estelle Getty’s from the show “The Golden Girls”.

9. Letting my husband see pictures of me wearing those glasses.

8. T.P,’ ing my high school science teacher’s front yard. Yup, got caught. By the police.

7. Skipping, for the first time ever, my last period of the day and running into my mom when I was filling my car up with gas.

6. Trying to fry a steak in my college roommate’s brand new skillet. (Still feel bad about that one.)

5. Letting the dog sleep on our bed.

4. Letting the dog sleep on our bed. I so strongly regret this one that I had to list it twice.

3. Introducing my kids to the cartoon, Wow Wow Wubbzy. seriously. regret. that.

2. Buying the little black dress that fell apart when I tried to wash it. (Hmmm, maybe I wasn’t supposed to wash it.)

And the number one biggest regret in my life . . .

1. Spending too much time regretting my decisions.

So, I guess there should be some gravity to this silly post. What do we do when we’ve made a mistake that we regret? Since I dogged him at the beginning of this post, I’ll make it up to my husband. Bad humor or not, he does give some pretty good advice.

Shortly before we got married, I made a mistake. Though I don’t even recall what I was stewing about, I distinctly remember the advice that my, then fiancé, gave to me. Don’t look back. Learn from your mistake and keep going forward. I don’t know why, but that day, the advice he gave kind of set me free. He was right. I didn’t need to regret the past; I just needed to learn from it. When you think about it, regret is a little bit like guilt. It’s a feeling, a fear, that just holds us back. So, learn from your mistakes and keep moving on. Best advice I ever got from a man whose sense of humor is questionable, but whose advice is always sound.

 

Neither go back in fear and misgiving to the past, nor in anxiety and forecasting to the future. But lie quiet under [God’s] hand having no will but His. ~ C.S. Lewis