GRATITUDE AND REGRETS
A few years back when I started receiving some spiritual guidance and emerged from a period of not talking about what was happening in my life, my conversation was dominated by regrets. I knew that we live life forwards, but a lot of me was still trapped in the past, regretful about choices I had made and the odd situation that my luck had been fabulous when it came to making a living, and far less fabulous in my personal life, despite or because, who knows, the fact that I valued my personal life far more than my livelihood.
It was pointed out to me how full of regrets I was and I knew it didn’t serve me. But what to do about it? I certainly wasn’t going to take any kind of cognitive approach of telling myself I shouldn’t regret things that it wasn’t helpful and therefore I should stop.
It turns out that what I did, without it being a kind of conscious choice, was I cultivated gratitude. I wanted to enhance my relationship with the more than human world that was in front of me when I sat on my bench in the little woods behind my house. I landed on the idea of expressing gratitude to the billions of beings who make my day to day life possible. Not just the blessing of the birds, the squirrels, the deer, this past year a chipmunk and the occasional fox kit who wandered past me living their lives, but all the unseen beings of the woods and soil. I’ve done this gratitude practice for maybe 5 years? Pretty shortly after adding my gratitude to the billions of beings who make my life possible, I added specific gratitudes to various humans—teachers, the place that takes care of my dog, the company that hired my son, my wife for all her running around. The other day when I was doing an elul repentance practice I noticed that I just don’t feel nearly as regretful as I used to.
My past hasn’t changed any. I still wish some things had been different than they actually were but that sense of unfairness was pretty much gone, that weight of the past just isn’t there. It’s a nice feeling, a freeing feeling, and I attribute it to a slow osmosis from my gratitude practice.
