For years I regretted the job I choose after college, always pondering how I would have been much better off if I had made a different decision.
Now, however, I realise I’ve wasted a huge amount of energy on a pointless activity – how could I regret something I never experienced?
I’m going to explain this one with an analogy. That our journey through life is like going for a drive or a walk. Every now and then choices come up – will you go right, left or straight on.
Whichever you chose you will never see the other routes once you have passed them. Later you might imagine what they would have been like – that they would have been more interesting and lead to a better place – but it is exactly that, just imagination.
Sometimes you can be fooled. You meet someone who did take a different turn to you and they seem to be in a better place so you can go kicking yourself for your bad choice. But it is an illusion.
Their life is completely unique, as is yours, and they were never at exactly the same junction you were at.
They took a job you could have taken and they appear happy and financially secure. You could have taken exactly the same job and ended up depressed and broke. You didn’t so you will never know.
But so easily we make up stories to ourselves, not recognising that they are a fantasy of the mind.
To say “if only I had” makes no sense because you have no idea what would have happened if you ‘had’ and if your life today would really be ‘better’.
Instead those energies are better spent letting regret drop away and accepting where you are now. Let your ‘I’ observe any sadness as an emotion that is and gradually it will dissolve because by observing you will then see what lies behind it makes no sense.
For me personally it started when I told a friend for the first time, 20 years after leaving college, how much I regretted the first job I took. I could have chosen a role with much higher pay but I turned it down because of the hours and my desire for a social life outside of work.
As a recent college grad I struggled with debt and scraped with bankruptcy on more than one occasion in the first decade of my working life. My mind told me all those stresses would have been avoided had I taken the big bucks job.
My friend listened, smiled and simply said, “I’m not so sure”. This was long before I got into enlightenment but those words stayed with me. Planting the seeds of doubt that I knew how something would have turned out.
Perhaps the stress of the job would have taken a much worse toll on my mental state or any other negative events would have taken place. I don’t know because I didn’t travel that road.
Of course I know plenty of people who did so I had tried to use them as yard sticks but I’ve now realised that is essentially pointless. For some of them it worked out, for some it didn’t, but none of them were me so who is to tell?
More recently I read the story of the man who waited to judge whether any incident was ‘lucky’ or not and I’ve understood a little better the illusions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
I actually have a sneaking suspicion (and a total acceptance) that where I am right now in life is absolutely fine. I have had plenty to learn along the way and I can use that knowledge going forward … but I have nothing to regret – how can I regret things when I do not know how they would have come to pass?