Or should I ask you a question?
…
Regret.
Although this word has power, sometimes such power that I fear it.
As many times as I have thought of using it, something stops me and I replace it. Like it's so heavy, so absolute that once I say it, I won't be able to take it back.
I've said it out loud countless times, mainly out of fear. I have said it countless times and from within, again out of fear, but another more structural fear.
For fear of invalidating a part of myself and the life path I have chosen.
I've been in a safe bubble lately. With people I love and who love me, creating and ending from fatigue after about 10 hours of action. Thus was created that time between decay and incorruption, when philosophy becomes familiar.
QUESTION: "What do you regret"
I asked blankly so that the question was addressed to everyone and no one, interrupting the natural flow of things at that time.
There was laughter, teasing and different pronunciations of the word "regret". As if it were something exotic, like a foreign word or like an attempt to completely appropriate it.
We probably shared the same fear and cast it out.
"Come on now, regret is a big word"
"I don't regret anything," she added in a dramatic tone, accompanied by an underlined movement, stereotypical acting of the past for ancient tragedy.
"I'll tell you," said one of the three. “I've thought about it a lot, I can't regret things and choices that were determined by things I carried. My economic class, my family, the country I live in. I can't say I regret even actions that arose from self-traits that arose from the above. I had no room. But I regret that I gave up sports, because I feel that I would have an outlet to release everything that the above restrictions made me feel."
This shift, from the event to its management, got me thinking.
Many times the stone that will fall into the lake attracts so much attention that the small circles that are created because of it and disrupt the entire water system go unnoticed.
I thought a lot about whether her response was another more imaginative and self-careful way to assuage the fear of the word "regret" in order to escape the "treasury" of life.
But I quickly realized that in one way or another my "regrets" always have to do with self-care on all levels.
And if self-care on a symbolic level often seems complicated and overwhelming, practical self-care is always a good start to having fewer regrets as you grow older.
*Cover photo: Jasper John's regrets, 2013, oil on canvas