Regrets-I’ve had a Few©

Sermon offered Feb 27 2022

Susan A Moran

This coming week brings with it the Christian season of Lent, which culminates in the celebration of the resurrection at Easter.  In between it’s ashes, temptation and sacrifice.  There is a lot of talk about sin and the devil. It’s hard to discuss sin or the devil in a UU worship service.  We don’t believe in such things, mostly, and if we do, we’d prefer to keep our sins to ourselves, thanks very much.

But none of us is immune from sin.  I know this because I never met anyone who doesn’t have regrets.  And what are regrets other than self-critical and negative feelings about something we should have done, or something we shouldn’t have done?  Sin hasn’t gone anywhere.  We just don’t use the word.

But we love to hear about it.  And watch it on tv.  I know this because of what gets shown as news, and the popularity of movies and television shows that deal with horror and murder, bargains with the devil, evil acts of depravity and perversion.  The American public cannot get enough of this stuff, and we are not immune either.

What have we done to satisfy ourselves at the expense of someone else? Where have we thrown our own souls under the bus in the name of helping our children?  If paying off a coach to lie about your daughter’s tennis abilities isn’t a bargain with the devil, I don’t know what is.

If you don’t like my language, fair enough.  But consider our regrets—aren’t they an indication of sin? Of where we have missed the mark either by actions we deem as negative—or by inaction?  Regrets occur when we have strayed from what we are capable of being. We have been dishonest, unkind, cruel, or manipulative.  We haven’t stepped up to take advantage of an offer, an invitation or an opportunity out of fear or laziness.

It is impossible to get through this life without having regrets, but we can at least try to not have the same type.

As promised in the eblast, I learned that there are  four major types of regret from one of the “How to Build a Life”  weekly columns by Arthur Brooks  He writes for the Atlantic Monthly, where he focuses on questions of meaning and happiness.  Brooks tells us that in “2020, the author Daniel Pink launched the World Regret Survey, the largest survey on the topic ever undertaken. With his research team, Pink asked more than 15,000 people in 105 countries, “How often do you look back on your life and wish you had done things differently?’

… Only 1 percent said they never feel regret.”

#1 Regret: Connection Regret.  “Wishing you’d been kinder to your partner is an example of a connection regret, in which you lament behavior that harmed an important relationship, such as spoiling a romance or neglecting your bond with a parent before they died.”

#2 Moral Regret “Many connection regrets overlap with moral regrets, in which you violate your own values. For example, you may pride yourself on being a loving person, and thus regret not living up to this image in the relationship you harmed. …Maybe you regret violating your commitment to kindness by snapping at a fellow commuter, or not living up to your commitment to your health when you ate a whole pizza.”…

Pink’s other two categories of regrets involve life choices.

“Foundation regrets are those in which you did something that affected the course of your life in a way you don’t like. A classic example is wishing you had stayed in school, or wishing that you hadn’t moved to New York on a whim.” Apparently some of the pandemic house purchases fit into this Foundation regret category.

“Boldness regrets are the opposite: They’re all about inaction and forgone opportunities. This is what you feel when you kick yourself for not taking a chance, as in, I should have just gone up to that attractive person and introduced myself.”  (all quotes are from How to Build a Life, Feb 3, 2022 The Atlantic Monthly)

Many of my regrets are the boldness variety—or the lack therof.  I should have said something to the good looking guy at Market Basket. I should have written to that author before she died.  I should have said YES to the invitations I have said NO to for years now.  But regardless of who you are, I am quite certain that you have some regrets.

We all have regrets.  We couldn’t be healthy humans without them.  Psychopaths are known to experience regret; but they don’t change their behavior because of them.  Most of us have the capacity to change.

Regret tells us what to do differently next time.  If I regret not listening to my child, I will make sure to do better next time.  If I don’t do better next time or the time after that, my child will learn to not expect anything from me because they know I never listen. Regret is only helpful to us if we are aware of it.

And sometimes being aware of a regret is not enough for us to change.  If we are disappointed by the choices we made 30 years ago, there isn’t a lot we can do about it.  In fact, it may preclude us from even trying to change because it’s too late.

I wonder about God’s thought process when I read about God’s great regret: Us.  Remember the flood in the Hebrew bible?  The sole reason for the flood was God’s regret.  The humans that God had been so pleased with in Chapter one of Genesis, the humans God made in God’s own image, these humans had turned out to be a huge disappointment.  I think God should have known what we were like as soon as God met Adam and Eve, but some of us are slower than others.  It took God many generations to decide that humanity wasn’t up to snuff and God had to wipe us out.

Did God regret killing everyone except Noah and his family?  I can imagine that during the period when Noah and his family were still on the boat, God may have felt God did the right thing.  Indeed, once finding land, Noah manages to behave himself at first, offering a sacrifice to God for saving him when the boat finally hits ground. God responds with a rainbow and a promise that never again will God destroy the earth by flood.

Noah responds to this great news by getting drunk.  His son Ham sees Noah naked and God curses him. Noah’s other sons, cover their father, and God blesses them.

What has changed?  As a species we are both magnificent and idiotic, brilliant and bafflingly stupid.  If there is a God in charge of us, I can only imagine that this God is majestically, royally and divinely  frustrated.

Perhaps God needs to read the same article I found in Psychology Today:

5 Tips for Coping with Regret.  I will not go over each one as with most of these articles, the tips are often no more than an overstatement of the obvious, as in: You will regret your actions less if you think before you act. 

Wow.

That doesn’t mean there is nothing here that can help us.  I liked the first suggestion of “Ditch “I’ll never to do that again” thinking.”

Please hear more from our author at Psychology Today:

“When we regret something, the feeling isn’t usually about a mistake we’ve made for the first time. Rather, we more often feel regret over falling into our common self-sabotaging patterns. You might regret staying up watching YouTube until midnight because you end up feeling exhausted at work all of the next day. You wish you’d gone to bed at 10 pm instead…

If you’ve fallen into certain traps dozens of times before, it’s not likely that you’ll never do those things again. Instead of vowing to never make the same mistake again, acknowledge that you need strategies for gradually improving your habits or limiting the negative consequences when you have failures of self-control.”

Here is another suggestion I found useful:

To cope effectively with regret, a subtle balancing act needs to happen. Ruminating isn’t helpful—but neither is attempting to just brush your feelings aside.

Try this: “Think about a small regret. For example, you didn’t doublecheck that you had your Costco card before leaving the house and got all the way to the store without it. That type of regret is something you want to give yourself a few minutes to absorb. If you feel frustrated with yourself and self-critical, those feelings will naturally dissipate pretty quickly on their own.

If you have a larger regret—e.g., you painted your house a color you don’t actually like just because the color was trendy—then it might take a few weeks or months for those feelings to dissipate. They’ll ebb and flow, and will likely pop up and bug you periodically.

In both examples, the more you can leave your emotions alone to just work themselves out, the better. If feelings of regret pop up and bug you intermittently, you can cope with that….

[H]uman emotions are a signaling system. A traffic light isn’t useful if either red or green are permanently lit. The light is only a useful signal if it changes to give you information. Emotions are like that, too: They’re designed to come on and then go away. When emotions become sticky, it’s usually because we’re feeding them in some way, through rumination, harsh self-criticism, or avoidance. If you allow your emotions to naturally work themselves out, that’s often more efficient and effective than trying to do something to “make” them go away, which can easily backfire.” (Alice Boyes, Ph.D., Psychology Today online Aug 3 2018)

Feel your feelings, don’t obsess but don’t deny.  The author doesn’t make this suggestion but talking to someone about your regret can be helpful.  Sometimes the scripts we have written about our regrets have lost all connection to reality, a connection that only an impartial observer can remind us exists.

Finally, the article’s most salient point for us is that some regrets will not be easily forgotten.

“When you regret something major, like having worked too much when your children were little, having stayed in a bad relationship too long, or having started late with retirement investing, try keeping in mind that regret is a universal human emotion, no matter what some people will claim about themselves. We’re all imperfect. You don’t need to create a silver lining out of every situation. Sometimes regret is just regret. “(Alice Boyes, Ph.D., Psychology Today online Aug 3 2018)

Sometimes regret is just regret.  There are sins we have committed, whether it is once or part of a pattern that we cannot undo.

We must learn to live with some of our regrets.  We will never be able to fix some of what we broke.

We will never be able to hear I am sorry from some of our loved ones, nor will we be able to say it so they can hear it.

But I promise you that it is never too late to change, or to heal from our brokenness. Remember David Whyte’s conclusion to our reading this morning: “Fully experienced, regret turns our eyes, attentive and alert to a future possibly lived better than our past.”

Even if we cannot change the past, we can learn from it.  We can make our present and our future a bit more honest.  We can aim for braver and kinder without feeling overwhelmed by the assignment.

One doesn’t gain the joys and wisdom of living all at once—we can only live in the day we are given, and some of them are pretty awful. But please remember poet Stanley Kunitz (The Layers).  Yes, we can roam through the wreckage, we can feel the bitter sting of losses.  But we shall not live in the litter but rather in the layers.  We must trust that we are not done with our changes.

May it be so and Amen.