My dear wife wrote a post this evening on the importance of regret. While this sounds counterintuitive at first, it’s quite a fascinating concept to explore. She and I worked very hard during the course of our dating relationship, and particularly when beginning to plan our wedding, to capture as best we could each of the many dreams we had for this relationship (and this wedding), in order to be able to enter our married life together with no regrets.
It is perhaps needless to say that life intervened. We do have some things we regret . . . little things, it might seem, but regrets none the less. And as her post points out, that’s ok . . . even necessary . . . in order to live a truly authentic life. As she says:
“Only when you can admit that your life isn’t perfect, that it’s full of “what-ifs” and “if-onlys”, and you name your regrets and live with them honestly, can you fully inhabit the life you have instead of trying to pretend that you’re living in the life you wished for.”
She says it much better than I could. Go read her post.
I also loved what your lovely wife wrote 🙂
I couldn’t help mulling over our wedding. Our photos are terrible. From 1988, in a store-front church. Nothing beautiful or formal or fancy. The photographer had no sense of composition – even basic stuff. (For the record, she was provided by a relative; we did not know or choose her.) We do not have a single good wedding photo of the two of us together. No nice shots of the wedding party either, as every single one was shot in front of the store front window (with faded purple valances over mini-blinds), and the back side of an upright piano right next to us. I have one fairly nice shot of me alone because it was taken close enough to cut out the awful stuff behind us.
Additionally, a relative offered to videotape the wedding. His camera malfunctioned, and there is sound pre- and post-ceremony, but just static during the actual event. I have no idea what we actually may have promised 😉
I was sad for a while. Now it’s laughable. And we’ve been married for 19 years this fall, so we got stuck together pretty well, despite the shortcomings of the day.
It’s interesting to me, as I get older, that some of the things I regret a lot – like our wedding pictures – fade away as time passes. I realize that I even regret my regret… and even in that, it brings me closer to living a more full and authentic life than I ever dreamed.