No regrets? Not so fast

Today I'm putting up a post by the accomplished Zen Teacher, James Ford, because I think it's an important subject. I'll insert some comments, because I think James' touch on this is a little light.  As a daughter of alcoholics, I've been the victim of people who fall somewhere on the scale between ordinary greedy egotist and sociopath.  Thus I think "no regrets" is a pernicious discarding of responsibility.

Here's James:

A Facebook friend posted a note about his regretting behaviors of a few years back. Comments followed. Among them a voice in defense of not regretting holding opinions that the writer saw as going against the tide, and nobly so. Sure. And…

The defenses of ego are strong. And, absolutely, sometimes they defend true things.

But, it was also said in context of someone expressing regret for past behaviors, and the writer’s friends seemed as likely as not to offer excuses.

And, it set me to thinking about our current ambiguous relationship to regret.

I looked up regret and quotes and saw they pretty much were all in favor of not having regrets. They tended to range from such comments as “Accept everything about yourself – I mean everything, you are you and that is the beginning and the end – no apologies, no regrets” from politician, and to some, war criminal Henry Kissinger, or, financial guru & motivational speaker Suze Orman’s fuzzy feel warm advice “When you’re happy you find pure joy in your life. There are no regrets in this state of happiness – and that’s a goal worthy striving for in all areas of life.” The list of people who were credited with the line, or very close to it, “I have no regrets,” included Edward Teller, Robert Redford, Jack Kevorkian, George McGovern, Ed Koch, Dionne Warwick, and Edward Snowden.

. . . and George Zimmerman

No regrets?

Really?

Now, another comment in that thread warned about wallowing in regrets. And a good warning, no doubt. And, again, in a context where someone was confessing to something that seemed regretful to me.

It is my observation that suggestion that regret can be obsessive, a poison in its own way, has often become an excuse.

What we seem to be invited into is a careening path of self-justification.

The ego has its ways to justify pretty much any behavior.

And our contemporary culture is more than happy to conspire with our egos, particularly if it can be accompanied by the sale of a product or service.

[I'm betting this manufacturer has no regrets at all about selling automatic weapons that end up being used to kill schoolchildren.]

Here’s the deal.

We are complex creatures. While it is in fact a bit too simplistic the Two Wolves story attributed to the Cherokee tradition that we have two wolves living in us, one that acts for the good, the other toward ill, and we need to be careful which one we feed can be helpful. Too simplistic because we in fact are a whole zoo of creatures. And the keepers. And the visitors. We are the giraffe. We are the keepers who put it down. We are the lions who ate the remains.

[When it comes to, oh, gobbling up fossil fuels and watering our lawns and destroying the planet, we are lemmings. Regret it.]  

If the image of zoo offends, let me offer another one, we, you and I, are, each of us, a forest. The rest follows, pretty much the same…

We are multitudes.

And, I have found in my life, by paying attention to what I do with as open a heart as possible, does indeed lead me to regrets.

I contain multitudes. And there are parts of me that are not pleasant. In another Facebook feed I commented on how I’ve started a class that teaches seventeenth century style dueling. A friend suggested I might be happier engaging a Chinese style martial art. My response was, but, I want something where I can hurt someone.

Mostly a joke.

And.

I contain multitudes.

And I think it wise to pay attention to the parts that step to the front. The parts that take action. And what those actions are. For just a moment, for just a heartbeat, not justifying, not denying, just looking.

And perhaps it leads to a pang of regret.

[And quite likely, in the words of the song, you "never intended to hurt anyone."  But you still did.  And that's regrettable.]

Which can be magic. With that hint of regret there several paths open. One is our old friend, to deny, or mitigate, neither of which is much different than the other. Another is to wallow in regret. Which is its own illness…

[a note:  Guilt is a whole-body thing, and basically useless; regret is a cognition, an insight in the mind, though it can make the body squirm.]

And, the other is to notice that isn’t really the animal I want to feed, and to change course.

We are, as one friend has put it, the unpredictable animal.

We can change.

And regret can be the little warning sign.

The canary in the coal mine.

Opening new worlds.

So, my wish for us all, is that we find our regrets, and sooner than later.

We all might be a bit better off for it…

[Grandma's advice to the young - when you find you're dating the guy or working for the woman who brags about No Regrets, ever, meaning they think they've never done anything wrong, you might consider a psychiatric evaluation.  Of them, if possible.  Or a new job.

The Problem of Aging

Escaping the frame

I was struck by this thought yesterday, and rushed to put it in a box on this blog:

 Being old is not necessarily a problem.  

It wasn't actually that striking, more like interesting in a quiet way.  So I've been thinking about problems in general and aging in particular.

Aging, being old, is a fact, a condition created by a series of experiences, of changes.  Problems themselves do not exist in reality.  The word problem is abstract, a concept in my head tied up with a judgement that it is difficult and I don't like it.  These thoughts made me remember Joan Halifax's story about when Issan was dying, and she was crying at his bedside.  He said to her, "That isn't necessary, you know."  He was a Zen master (so is she), so I thought seriously about that.  Not necessary to be sorry your friend is dying?  How about yourself - does your death have to be a problem?  Is sickness necessarily a problem?  Is pain?

Using the word problem is a way of framing a large issue.  You could say the real problem is not aging, but that we resist its reality instead of  flowing with it.  It's like "difficult emotions" in that way.

Framing a couple of issues

It's funny how we welcome risk and surprise when we pay for it.  People go to theme parks, travel uncomfortably on planes and go more uncomfortably through airports, which have become fun houses, delays popping up like monsters in the corner.  We deliberately meet fear on roller coasters, we pay to be thrown around on those teacup rides. But when life throws us around, we hate it.

These thoughts must be growing out of my current interest in softening to difficult feelings (discussed a little in the previous post).  My own "difficult" feelings arise when I don't like what's happening.  Depression. Pain.  People who don't do what they said they would (had to throw in something trivial). 

I couldn't explain why, but this is making me visualize making a not-too complicated mandala.  Reds for desire.  Some black strokes for judgement.  Here and there beautiful greens, restful lavender......What would be at its center?  Maybe a nice peaceful white, or a blue sky with puffy high clouds passing over.  Maybe some glitter.  

Do atheists exist?

The TED talks are as good a place to begin your study of humankind as any - all these highly motivated people!  Motivated to do what?  Anything from cure blindness in Africa to swim a specific body of water at age 60.  The first you can certainly understand as a purpose in life, though it's going to run you into grave problems of overpopulation and famine.  The second, well, maybe you can see the point, but I can't.  I just never got into Amazing Feats of the Body.  Yet I've seen a world enthralled by a similarly ridiculous contest of minds, chess between a snotty kid named Bobby Fischer and the world champion, Boris Spassky.  This was decades before the personal computer could beat us all at anything.  You wouldn't believe how interested we all were in this, because it had something symbolic to do with the Cold War.  That doesn't exist now, either.  You could say it never did, just an idea.  Poor Bobby - his Wikipedia entry includes a section called "Sudden Obscurity."  No kidding.

Inflicted as I am with shingles (painful) and depression (worse) - and who knows whether they're related or just different neurons colliding in the mix - I found myself watching a TED talk by someone on whether I exist.  I won't name him or post it, because I've found it a bad policy in life for a little tiny bug to make an implacable enemy of a powerful person.  But really . . . it was a tasteless porridge of Buddhism for Toddlers and modern science.  
But this guy got himself a PhD in philosophy and went on to make a career out of talking about this kind of thing and writing books about the rock-bottom-dumb questions of (Western) philosophy, which must surely be as dead as chess by (snail-) mail.  

In that, a nerd sent another nerd a move on a postcard.  A penny postcard.  Nerd2 thought about it and made his move and sent a postcard.  Try to imagine a world that slow.  That was a world in which long distance calls cost a lot of money, and were only made in the event of a death.  But you knew you existed and so did everything else, and it never changed.  Every Sunday night Dinah Shore came out in what seemed to be the same prom dress and sang "See the USA in your Chevrolet . . . " and blew a kiss.  She does not exist anymore, but are you telling me she didn't?  I saw her. 


You, however.  No, according to this TED talk, you don't exist.  I mean, what made you think you did?  The fact that every night of your life you confront the same stubborn stupid oily skin?  Your exact  cowlick?  The food trap between the  molars on your lower left?

No, you're just a bunch of relationships, the way water is just a couple of hydrogen atoms mingling with an oxygen.  So if you thought there was Evian and Yellowstone and the Baltic Sea, there was rain and ice cubes, think again. 


There are opposing theories about existence, such as the belief that we are all ideas in the mind of God.  I rather like that, but if I were an atheist, it would make me nervous.