Regrets

Regrets I will never say— I could never say— that I have no regrets. To say that would be to say I never made mistakes. And to say I never made mistakes would be to say I know everything. To know everything is impossible; it would also be to learn nothing. How could I live and interact with living beings and hurt no one? And even if I value what I learn from all the mistakes I made with myself and others, how could I not regret hurting others ? And even if those hurts caused those people to learn things, I can’t say I’m glad to have been the agent of the hurt that precipitated such learning as that learning would be to their credit, not mine. I’m still responsible for the initial hurt— even if what I did was done in ignorance, or was unintentional, or was done with the very best of intentions. Sometimes an injured person goes on to do further damage to self or others; I’m not responsible for that because we can’t control all the things that happen to us; We only control how we react to an event, So I regret many things I did and many things I didn’t do. And when some adult speaks of having no regrets, I wonder how that person lived, and managed to do everything right, And made no serious mistakes and hurt no one— not one single person.