Paperwork: Think about what you are calling ‘failures’ in your life

I don’t do regrets.

Well, I try not to, but it’s not easy. Maybe even impossible.

You don’t have to be older to want to reshape moments in the past. Especially when you’ve done something to hurt another. That’s what seems to haunt me the most.

I try to mend broken bridges from the past if I can, and then move on. Otherwise I’d remain stuck in a swamp of regrets. What tends to linger, though, is guilt – the stuff that stains time.

Is that the same as regret? Perhaps. Either way my past actions seem to get heavier over time. How we measure ourselves has something do with this dilemma.

Sadly we speak often of success versus failure – an interesting yardstick to stand beside. But if you’re going to do that – reflect and evaluate your life – be careful how you define “failure.”

Let me share some guidance, a better way to examine your personal history. These thoughts come from Helen Bright. I don’t know Helen but I like how she thinks. She shared the following via tumblr.com where she is known as “brightwanderer”:

“I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned ‘forever’ into the only acceptable definition of success.

“Like … if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a ‘failed’ business.

“If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a ‘failed’ writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a ‘failed’ marriage.

“The only acceptable ‘win condition’ is ‘you keep doing that thing forever.’ A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a ‘real’ friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a ‘phase – or, alternatively, a ‘pity’ that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is ‘dying’ because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

“I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success … I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.”

Helen Bright is correct. I can wish certain things never happened, or led to painful aftermaths or simply ended too soon. I can call them mistakes, I suppose.

But if I am going to peer into the past through hindsight, I also should see my joy, passion, love, purpose, and ambition. I should rediscover all the magic wrapped around those moments when choices were made.

If I washed away those choices, all my regrets, I would also be removing that magic.

And that, I am certain, I would regret.

Lonny Cain, retired managing editor of The Times in Ottawa, also was a reporter for The Herald-News in Joliet in the 1970s. His Paperwork email is lonnyjcain@gmail.com. Or mail The Times, 110 W. Jefferson St., Ottawa, IL 61350.