Pool Of Regret
Regret
by Jana
Regret is a dark well hidden deep within my soul.
A still, quiet place, I find myself plunged there in the most unexpected times. A documentary on archeology, a handshake with an elderly man, a hug from a friend. Sudden memories pull me down into the depths of regret. “What could have been” becomes a weight, attaching itself to my soul. “What if,” “should have,” and “if only,” echo through the waters as I feel myself sinking lower.
Floating in and out of consciousness, a fleeting image appears. For a single moment, I see a future. Lives I can still impact, truths I can pass on, and damages I can yet undo pass before my eyes.
As the first buoyant glimmer of hope enters my soul, I feel my body floating to the surface. Dreams for the future are a knife, cutting off the weight of regret. Visions of what can still be, endue me with the strength to swim to the shore.
Walking again on the dry land, I look behind me. The pool of regret remains.
Still filled with thousands of memories, it endures, unchanged through my survival.
As I hike away, my steps begin to lighten. I smile to myself, filled with potential, and determined to live this day to it’s fullest. Past mistakes can never be completely forgotten, but the future may be lived in such a way as to spawn no new regrets.
posted by g at 12:59 PM
11 Comments:
Beautiful, both picture and words :o)
Exactly what Jona said.
Eerie picture. Suggestive of so much.
Beautiful, descriptive words that describe so well our human feelings.
The only way I know out of regret is forgiveness. Forgiving ourselves is often the hardest but the most healing.
Wow. Absolutely beautiful.
Both the photo and the words were amazing, bringing out emotions in me of my past regrets. I like the way it ended, moving away from regrets. We need to do that in order to move on but learn from the regrets. Each day it gets easier to leave them far behind.
Thanks everyone for the compliments.
Karen, hopefully you are right.
Presence, easier said than done LOL I agree about the eerie photo... maybe if you ask really nicely, G will tell you more about the setting?
I think that often, no matter what choice we make, we might always regret not having made a different choice.
Interesting topic, and I wholly agree with the last paragraph. If not for the title, I don't know if I would've known right away that the photo was water. Mesmerizing.
i love that photograph, and your hope in the last line.
thanks... i love that quote. i appreciate you directing me over there, your thoughtfulness means a lot.
Thank you Jana. These words about regret are universal. Sometimes people tell me I am being too hard on myself when I mention my regrets, and my response is usually something like, well you had to be there. There's no getting around it. You can pull the wool over other people's eyes, but you can't fool yourself. Presence, I don't know if the answer is forgiveness, or whether like Jana says, you just have to walk away from the pool.
The picture, incidently is of a bubbling springs near an old Indian trail in the Minisink region of the Delaware River. Eeery it is.
The spring is a little walk from the road where a historical marker talks about fleeing families stopping at the spring after the Wyoming Massacre in 1778.
That's the Wyoming Valley just south of present day Scranton. And in 1778, American revolutionaries, Tories, the British, the Indians, and Canandian and German mercenaries were contesting the turf. It's a big stretch to imagine what life must have been like then, and I'm sure this little spring has seen lots of regrets.
The quote that Kerry mentions is by Alan Watts and was posted at http://whiskeyriver.blogspot.com on Wednesday, but I shall include it here:
"If you ask, "What did you do yesterday?" the average person will consult memory and give you a very attenuated, strung-out chronicle of events, having reduced yesterdays experience to a thin line of words. What you did yesterday becomes what you noticed yesterday, and what you noticed yesterday was a very tiny part of what happened. It was only as much as you could record in some memory code, in words or in brief impressions.
If you identify yourself with that skinny little stream of life, it is no wonder that you feel unsatisfied, because you ate the fish bones instead of the fish. And since we think that is what is happening all the time, and that life is only this skinny little thing, we feel hungry for experience, for thrills, and for ecstasy.
We say, "There must be more coming," and we need more and more future, because the past is gone, and it was a scraggly past anyway. We have no present, because life looks like an hourglass: It has a big future and a big past, but only a tiny little neck of a present that everything is squeezed through."
- Alan Watts
Regret, it tears me up. Enough said.
The image does calm me, expecially now that I've started mentally tabulating my regrets ...
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