Life is a journey alright. Full of mistakes too....wrong turns, poor words, unfortunate decisions, blind stares, selfish choices....we all do it, make mistakes, and we all at times do it at the expense of others.
I am of the mind that making mistakes is ok because you learn from the process and move on, and after all we are human and that does involve a few imperfections! However, sometimes we don’t learn from our mistakes, we require a few goes first! Also sometimes in the process of making said mistakes we take a few others along for the ride, and it’s not always their choice to join us!!
I am sitting contemplating my own journey of course, and bits of it are none too pleasing! I could fill a few cathartic pages with what those bits entailed but I wouldn’t make another mistake and boor the minds of my readers! Enough just to say that contrary to my early wish to embrace the stance of NO REGRETS, I am not on par with Edith Piaf! Regrets exist in my world, regretfully.
Some of my mistakes will not really go away...the result of some mistakes is that you cannot turn back....like the words you say that you should never have said...like the arguments you had with folk or in front of folk, especially your children, that will always live on as a memory. Like the angry words you let fly when feeling heated, pressed against a wall or just plain out of control of the journey!! Like the big life decisions you make, to borrow money, take on a mortgage, leave your job, go to a new job, change residence, or whatever.....that sometimes need a rethink, cause necessary more decisions and effect the lives of all the family and often friends.....you cannot take the effects of these back, you just try to rewrite the process of them and find ways to mitigate them....you learn to work with them, and of course they leave an indelible mark on the rest of the journey....
So I believe that unfortunately, sometimes mistakes are not ok...they are just plain old mistakes and making them can only cause the journey to be harder and you to be crankier and others to suffer and there are no turning backs only moving forwards.......we have to move forward beyond the desire to give up and we have to push past the mistake itself and try to facilitate the journey for everyone’s sake, least of all our own!
This isn’t always easy and often includes a few more mistakes, just for good (poor choice of phrase) measure. Ah well, this is the very nature of the journey I guess, and once we are on it stopping is not an option. So yes regrets are there...but focusing on them at the expense of the moment and those to come would just be regrettable wouldn’t it?
One thing I know for sure, I have always tried to make it all (and I mean ALL) work...I have always put my all into it....I have always come from a place with very good intentions...and yes I am aware that intentions are funny hidden things that no-one but self really sees...with the consequence that actions do not always follow intentions to a tee because intentions often are often unrealistic and often do not foresee other mitigating circumstance.... we are seldom judged by our intentions and always judged by our actions, which again unfortunately embraces the notion of regret!
So the journey pushes us along and we tumble about on the path looking for a foothold and trying to smile while doing so! We occasionally reach out to a fellow stumbler and lock hands or eyes or hearts and we stumble on together....we occasionally offer a life line to those falling off the path and a direction to those at a crossroads, and occasionally the same is done for us, sometimes with genuine love, sometimes with a string or two attached.......either way the path is full of fellow stumblers, being tumbled and we would do wise to avoid bumping into them! The object of the journey in the final analysis is, I believe, to stay true to one’s intent, and even if it is hidden from view and even if our actions cannot always live up to its high standards, we should keep our intent, and keep it pure, we should intend to be the best we can, do the best we can and give the best we can......and in the end it will be our intent that we can judge ourselves on.....and perhaps it will be our intent that we can then have no regrets about......
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