No regrets - period or question mark?

A conversation a few days back sparked another conversation with myself about what it means to be wise. Is it our ability to synthesize the mistakes of others and to avoid them, or is it our fearlessness to search and to live without abandon, and in the process, stumble a bit but only to learn from them? I think it's both and that these are simply flavors of the same thing. Some things are very clearly inborn traits, and my general fear of hardship is certainly one of those. I don't ever remember a time when I wasn't obsessed with hiding under a blanket of security & caution. As a result, I've developed (and have had to develop) my pre-mistake wisdom to compensate for a serious lack of post-mistake wisdom.

But besides being left with a relatively boring palette of stories to share over a cocktail, I now wonder if this blandness of existence is or is at least becoming a malady of the spirit. Sure, I cannot fault myself for my choice in this trade-off - it has indeed ensured a good & peaceful existence, something that many would hope to have.

But learning by doing is the only way to be true to oneself, and this fear has kept me from doing that. What did I fear? Everything, in short. Shame, regret, social judgment, under-performance, losing "competitiveness" for various external "goals," health & well-being. And yes, glory, & excitement, as well as self-knowledge and understanding, do come at those costs. We can read about other people's advice or suggestions all we want, but in the end, we find out they may have had a different set of values & criteria to begin with, that they had different goals, or that (most obviously) they simply had a different personality. So their mistake may not be your mistake, or if it is, you may learn something different. And what's lost is time, because the lessons you gathered from someone else's experiences may not always apply, and when you accidentally or knowingly repeat one of those "mistakes," you realize you could have been further along had you done it earlier or had you not tried to buy a faulty safety net at all costs.

And why fear regret? Why are we all so regret-obsessed? A regret is by definition a feeling where one wishes one had done something differently so as to avoid whatever negative consequences have come with such an action. But aren't those same regrets, or rather, the actions that led to those regretful thoughts, the same things that make us who we are? Isn't a regret also by definition a reflection, a confirmation of a state of "afterwards?" And have we forgotten about those positive consequences? an opportunity for analysis, introspection, growth, and hopefully maturity? Even when we actively avoid regrets, they seem to find their way into our lives anyway, because our pre-mistake judgments simply cannot be perfect.

But back to our definition - a regret is not an action, but rather a feeling. In this sense, we are free to dictate our own perceptions of the matter, so something is regrettable only if we choose to dwell on the unpleasant things it brought after-the-fact. So I stand by the directive to live with no regrets - to go after something to have no regrets and to not regret something if it comes out differently than expected.