It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do, the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy. We can't tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on."
"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us" wrote Kafka. We are the books we've read, the people we've meet, the places we've been to. For me, the axe for the frozen sea within was the above snippet taken from Matt Haig's book "The Midnight Library".
It is the regrets that make us shrivel, and while I could've developed other talents, said yes to different offers, worked harder, loved better, handled my finances more astutely, and been more popular - as for the band, I had van Gogh's ear for music - at least I had gone to Australia.
