Change Our Past And Have No Regrets

Do you have any regrets currently?

If you died tomorrow, would you be able to say, “I have truly lived my life and I have no regrets?”

I had a conversation with a friend recently. He doesn’t live with his parents anymore as he lives overseas.

He said to me, “Kitty, I would like to move back to my home country to spend time with my parents as they are getting old and I would like to do that before they pass on.”

He also said he wishes that he had spent more time with them when he was young, when he was still at home living with them, and that he had treated them nicer.

Like many of us, as and when we get older, we realize how bad we were when we were kids with all that troubles we gave to our parents, and yet they tolerated us in such a graceful and gracious way.

I asked my friend, “Why do you think like that? Why wish for all this?”

The “I wish”, more often than not, gives us a lot of regrets in life. We keep thinking, “I wish I had done that earlier”, “I wish I had said that” or “I wish I had done that better.”

If we choose to live every moment honestly and truthfully to who we are and we do the best that we can, then that’s all it matters.

Don’t live life with any regrets.

Like my friend, he said he wishes he had spent more time with his parents. But the reality is if he wanted to at a time, he would have done so. The fact that he didn’t have the desire to do that at time, that’s why he chose to live overseas and not with his parents.

Had he forced himself to do the things that he didn’t have the desire to at a time, no one would know what result it could have been. It could have been a whole lot worse.

He could have argued with his parents daily. They might not talk to each other ever again because of that.

The truth is we will never be able to find out what would have been the otherwise had we taken actions or spoken differently. We assume and believe that IF we had done this better or earlier or IF we had said this or that instead, then it wouldn’t be the way that it is.”

It is all a self-created illusion and belief.

Whatever we think that might or could have been better, we don’t know for sure. There is no point beating ourselves up thinking that we have done something wrong, we didn’t do what we should have or we didn’t do enough. So remove that thought that is not here to serve us.

We can’t change our past that’s already happened. What we can change though is the past that is about to become our past.

Try this simple exercise.

Close your eyes for a minute. Consciously take a long inhale. Then exhale completely. Open your eyes. Do this before you read on.

That breath has become our past.

We could have taken the breath without paying any attention to it. The fact that we took a conscious breath, we decided how that breath would remain as part of our past.

Having regret in life is very painful. But carrying the regrets for the rest of our life is even more painful.

We can’t change the past that is already happened. But we do have control and power to change the past that is about to become our past.

So change our past and have no regrets.