Indeed... If I don't -- at least temporarily -- regret some things it likely means I didn't put much on the line.
Two kinds of regret: 1. Regret making a mistake. Making mistakes is part of existence and learning. Regret is a natural consequence of messing things up. Moving on from the regret is also part of the learning.
2. Regret for losing something we love, or for loving something we can't have. This can be problematic, if not framed correctly. But also something we learn to move beyond. But it's also, again, part of the richness of a life well lived -- to make or seek attachments and feel regret when they're lost and to constantly re-evaluate. We lost my mother in law to cancer 11 years ago. I often feel regret for not making better moments with her before it ended, and so on. That regret is just part of the nature of having love and attachment in my life. Giving it up would make me a poorer person.
We will potentially all leave this world with a sense of loss or regret. If I didn't, I would worry about what kind of dissociated detachment I was carrying with me.
I don't know, maybe I will live a rich full life and die after I'm just tired of living, with no sense of loss?
I'm an organism that feels both joy and suffering. I try to minimize the latter in favour of the former. But there's no formula to avoiding suffering that doesn't involve joyless detachment. It requires intellectual and emotional effort to analyze and deal with every situation. That's just part of the story.
Two kinds of regret: 1. Regret making a mistake. Making mistakes is part of existence and learning. Regret is a natural consequence of messing things up. Moving on from the regret is also part of the learning.
2. Regret for losing something we love, or for loving something we can't have. This can be problematic, if not framed correctly. But also something we learn to move beyond. But it's also, again, part of the richness of a life well lived -- to make or seek attachments and feel regret when they're lost and to constantly re-evaluate. We lost my mother in law to cancer 11 years ago. I often feel regret for not making better moments with her before it ended, and so on. That regret is just part of the nature of having love and attachment in my life. Giving it up would make me a poorer person.
We will potentially all leave this world with a sense of loss or regret. If I didn't, I would worry about what kind of dissociated detachment I was carrying with me.
I don't know, maybe I will live a rich full life and die after I'm just tired of living, with no sense of loss?
I'm an organism that feels both joy and suffering. I try to minimize the latter in favour of the former. But there's no formula to avoiding suffering that doesn't involve joyless detachment. It requires intellectual and emotional effort to analyze and deal with every situation. That's just part of the story.