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“Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures,” the Indian Swami Sivananda wrote, “as this will only
fill your mind with grief, regret and depression.”

Regret, one of the ghosts of aging, comes upon us one day dressed up like wisdom, looking profound
and serious, sensible and responsible. It prods us to begin to look back. It presses us to question
everything we’ve ever done: I should have listened to my mother…; I should have stayed in school…; I
should have waited to get married…; I should have changed jobs….

Regret claims to be insight. But how can it be spiritual insight to deny the good of what has been for
the sake of what was not? No, regret is not insight. It is, in fact, the sand trap of the soul. It fails to
understand that there are many ways to fullness of life, all of them different, all of them unique.

Regret is a temptation. It entices us to lust for what never was in the past rather than to bring new
energy to our changing present. It is a misuse of the aging process. One of the functions—one of the
gifts—of aging is to become comfortable with the self we are, rather than to mourn what we are not.
When we devalue it, we bring everything we are and were into question, into doubt. We doubt the God
who made us and walks with us all the way to the end.

But the regret that comes with age can also be the very grace we need to connect again with the
energy that brought us to this moment in the first place. Regret comes with two faces: to regret our
life choices is one thing, but to regret our serious failures is entirely another.

When we regret the roads that have led us to where we are now, we risk the loss of the future. We
drain it of new possibility. We fail to see that these new roads we’re on can be just as life-giving, just
as good for us, just as full of God-ness as the road we’ve come down in the past.

However, when we regret doing what we should never have done—injuring someone’s reputation,
abusing someone we loved, abandoning the truth for the sake of advancement or approval, violating our
own bodies to the point of physical or emotional degradation—we know we have grown into someone of
value. It is a moment of great enlightenment when we realize that the years have grown us as well as
sustained us. We are more substance now than we were when we were young, whatever we did in the
past, wherever we were when we did it.

The fact is that the twinges of regret are a step-over point in life. They invite us to revisit the ideals
and motives that brought us to where we are now. They remind us of the people we loved, the sense
of direction that drove us on, the commitments we made and kept. It is the choices we made in the
past that have brought us to be the person we are today.

--from The Gift of Aging: Growing Older Gracefully