Welcome, learn from and reflect on life’s regrets
Ask people their favorite Christmas season holiday movies and you will get everything from “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Story” to what has now become the most popular Christmas film — “Die
Hard.” On
Christmas Day it runs continuously on a cable channel.
For poignant messages served with comedy, the film “Home
Alone” has something to offer. The plot: A family about to leave on a Christmas trip to Europe leaves one of the children behind, and that child confronts all sorts of challenges, and at every turn he thwarts the attempts of inept thieves to break into his home.
One message from the film: we can get so busy this time of year that we forget what is important.
Another message in the film concerns a theme classically illustrated by Ebenezer Scrooge — the possibility that people can change.
An elderly neighbor, whom the abandoned boy at first fears, expresses his deep sorrow over broken relations in his family. There is reconciliation and joy in the end, a welcome note of pathos amid all the slapstick.
Our holidays this time of year emphasize thanksgiving and family togetherness, gift-giving and joy, and all of us live in the hope that people — even we ourselves — can change, hence all the focus on those upcoming New Year’s resolutions.
Inevitably we take our ordinary busyness into the holidays and then accelerate it, yet we seem to want very much to re-evaluate our lives and relationships, to think about our priorities, to reconnect with the people we love and care about most, and to share ourselves with others.
This is a season with all of its holidays that calls us to reflect. The stories that come our way — in films and literature and in our many shared recollections — touch us with reminders about the importance of reflecting on our lives and our relationships.
Reflection is reviewing and taking stock, looking backward and considering all that has affected and shaped us.
We are, of course, shaped by blessing and grace and goodness, but there are other reflective questions to consider: Do we acknowledge the things we regret? Do we embrace our stories even with the mistakes and wrong turns? Do we find ourselves stopped by guilt and sadness and wishing things were — or had been — different? Do we find ourselves interpreting the past in ways that blame others for the brokenness we experience in our lives?
The political columnist, Charles Krauthammer, died a few months ago. In his last column, knowing his end was imminent, he offered this comment: “I leave this life with no regrets.”
I am sure he meant to express that he was fortunate to have found the vocation that allowed him to work meaningfully and with purpose with people he came to know as good friends and colleagues.
His life, he said, looking back “was full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living.” These were grand sentiments and bespeak a wonderful life. But I confess to having been stunned by his summing up that he had “no regrets.”
We all make mistakes. We all find ourselves making decisions based on information that can prove to be inadequate, one-sided or simply wrong; we all do things in life that we would take back if we could.
Sometimes it is in big things, like choosing a vocation, or committing to a partner or even making an investment.
I don’t know how one lives without regrets being a part of life, especially everyday life. Without mistakes and reflection on them, without the experience of regret, we could not grow or improve — we could not even learn.
Reflecting on the past, taking stock and facing honest self-assessment is vital to spiritual growth. Our reluctance to do that, to reach instead for the armor we don to protect ourselves, is to deny a place for humility in our lives and to turn away from the possibility of our own transformation.
A good and wise friend was asked not long before he died whether at his advanced age (mid 90s) he still saw anxiety lurking. He said, “Behind every bush! I do not try to contain it. I greet it. Anxiety comes from within me so is a part of me. I want to welcome it, name it, baptize it.”
Grounded in reflections of gratitude for the fullness of his life, this friend acknowledged how regrets shaped his learning — regrets were essential to self-discovery.
As with anxiety, always looking forward, perhaps also with regrets, which is always looking backward. If regrets are inescapable, we should welcome them and learn from them, for we journey with them in any event.
May the light of this season shine even on our regrets. Reflecting on our regrets — welcoming them — allows us to move on and accept all that makes up the fullness of our lives.