Regret

Sitting at the airport in LA, preparing to board a flight back to Portland, I found my mind drifting to what felt like my shadow self, sitting in the international terminal preparing to board a flight to Rome.  I remembered when Heiko told me on our hike in Yosemite about his anxious thoughts during the first flight of his nine month solo journey:  “What am I doing?”  Is that what my shadow self was thinking?  “What am I doing getting on this plane to Europe?  I’m already overwhelmed after five days in LA!  How can I handle a solo trip across the Alps, across the UK, five farms in four months?  What am I thinking?!”  Or would I be feeling grateful I had resisted the urge to settle at Laurelwood, grateful for having the faith to try and exhilarated by courage, or flattened by loneliness and anxiety?  When I arrived back at Portland, I felt myself stiffen in resistance, and making my way up the Laurelwood drive past the familiar garden and towards the blue green roofs, I felt no relief, no warmth, no sense of coming home.  What settled on me was sadness, a twinge of loneliness, and a sense of stifling predictability and resignation.

The tricky thing about Regret is that it thinks it knows everything.  It’s certain that if I had boarded the other plane, I wouldn’t be doubting my choice.  It imagines me as my strongest, most vibrant self, taking on the world and expanding my friendships, my confidence, and my clarity.  On that journey, I would not be troubled about wasting my money, abandoning an opportunity to grow spiritually, cutting off my budding friendships, or having over-estimated my resourcefulness and stamina.  I remind myself of how I have been overwhelmed in the past by change and logistics, seething anxiously and shutting down socially.  “But,” counters Regret, “maybe you missed your chance to see how much you have changed.”  Regret sees an abundant world out there waiting to fulfill me while I languish in restrictive smallness, tedium, and hesitation.

And so I begin bargaining.  I can take this trip again, and it will be even better next time because my research will enable me to make wiser choices about the richest opportunities and pace.  I will have more farming skills, a stronger body, experience living in community, and the benefit of some excellent spiritual practices to ground me.  Perhaps I will even take the trip as part of graduate studies or a fellowship.  And if I’m able to recover my non-refundable deposits through my travel insurance, my investment will be neutralized and I can start from scratch.  But Regret knows it isn’t that simple.  I can plan another trip, but this one – with all the chance meetings and influences that can never be reproduced – is gone. Forever.  It feels like something I was supposed to do, something I was supposed to experience so I could learn something and experience something.  But now I will never know what that thing was.

Then I received the email I’d been anticipating for two weeks: a response to the first cancellation I sent.  Steve and Fiona had spent two hours with me on Skype, finished a cob house so I would have a comfortable place to stay, let me cut my apprenticeship in half so I could work around the Schengen visa and still get to Italy, and already had a 6-month apprentice cancel on them this year.  They were the people I was most looking forward to meeting, the richest learning opportunity, and the core visit my itinerary revolved around.  When I didn’t hear back from them right away, I was worried.  When I sent a follow-up, Steve replied that he had waited to respond because he didn’t want to send an emotional email.  I felt hurt and ashamed.  I wanted everyone to celebrate my willingness to shift direction mid-flight, and while most did, I could not fully escape the potential damage of my choice.  The sense of disappointing kind, hard-working people in a way that may permanently damage their trust in me was nearly unbearable.  That opportunity may now be gone forever, cut off before even flowering.

I understand how loss works.  I have lived through the stages of grief many times – the denial, the bargaining, the anger, and the sadness that must come before acceptance.  I had hoped to make this choice without enduring consequences, but I have risked both of the futures I was trying to choose between.  My fantasy voyage is gone and Regret is lodged inside me, blocking my life force from thriving where I am, and tainting the life I hoped to embrace by abandoning my trip.  As this realization settles in, the anger begins to take hold.  I did not make the decision to cancel in a settled and peaceful space.  I felt agitated by the looming deadline and moved by my affection for my current home.  I should have known better than to switch gears before getting both my heart and mind on board, I should have trusted my past inspirations, I should have followed the biggest, most courageous vision, and I should have graciously accepted the gift I had worked so hard to give myself.  These sentiments gathered weight in my morning meditation, over-powering my will to stay serene and detached.  I rushed from the room out into the morning light, found a sheltered meadow where I could sob alone, and cried out, “Fuuuuuuuck! What have I done?!”

Shouldering all this self-directed rage and my utter helplessness to make amends felt barely tolerable, and so it shifted outward, towards the community I had sacrificed for.  I blamed these people I had just days before wept over in gratitude for manipulating me, exploiting me, being untrustworthy and unsafe.  I labeled and rejected their values and way of life, their guru, their cult.  And so my heart closed against both myself and my new home.  I began doubting all of my decisions. Was the intensity of my current regret and rebellion a deeper expression of my soul’s longing than my outpouring of affection during devotional singing?  Was the trip itself really the call of my spirit, or just an impulsive way to deal with the disappointment of not getting hired on at my last job?  Was I wrong to leave my last spiritual community, my marriage, my job?  If, as neuroscience reveals, our memory is faulty, our emotions suspect, our imagination out of touch with what really makes us happy, how can I trust any decision I’ve ever made?  I suddenly found myself losing not just my trip and my orientation towards the future, but my entire sense of self.

Then I came full circle back to Regret’s insidious way of thinking it knows everything.  Why should I believe what it tells me when I find myself questioning everything else?  Regret can tell me I should have gotten on that plane to Rome and everything would have been golden, but the one thing that is certain is that I just don’t know how it would be.  I don’t know anything about how the future will unfold.  I don’t even know what I know about myself anymore.  Am I a world traveler, a farmer, a leader, a wife, a student, a mystic, a mother, an entrepreneur, a singer, a writer?  What I know is that the idea of this trip sustained me for three months of rapid transition.  It gave me a sense of purpose during deepening financial insecurity and social isolation.  It made me feel bold and vibrant at a time when I was facing my addictions head-on.  And for all that, I have a deep sense of gratitude for that dream, even though it was not one of my paper boats destined to touch water.

Now it is my task to make peace with the fact that I am a childless, divorced, formerly professional woman in her late 30’s who just cancelled the trip of a lifetime to wash dishes, weed, and meditate.  That sounds crazy to me.  And it is.  It’s just one more scene in my life that doesn’t make sense based on any script I’ve ever received.  I don’t know how this story ends.  I don’t have the benefit of looking back on this moment from 6 months or five years or three decades down the line and laughing at how perfectly it fit with everything that came after.  The last time I was tortured by Regret was the moment I realized I could have found the strength to take on the job I was offered in March of last year.  But so much goodness unfolded from that choice that I couldn’t see at the time.  Right now, I am so short-sighted.  I do not fully understand what I need, where I am going, or how my presence, or even my absence, is shaping lives.

The choice I now face is whether to marinate in resentment over a decision I am now powerless to change or to embrace the life I have with self-forgiveness and faith that the same forces that brought me through past trials will continue to guide me towards where I need to be, who I am becoming, and what I have to give.  In that sense, perhaps the choices I make matter far less than my attitude about what isn’t meant to be mine.  As a woman who has always struggled with a sense of scarcity, who has never wanted to miss out on anything, and who has always wanted to experience, learn, taste, touch, feel, kiss, and love everything I can, it is bewildering to consider that perhaps no life I choose is better than any other.  Where ever I go, I will be faced with the same challenge of loving myself and all the people in this world as we are.  Whatever I do will be an expression of who I am and what I am meant to be doing.  If I am meant to have a spiritual life, I will have one – here or out in the world.  If I am meant to have a family, it will find me here or on the road.  I can stop searching for a spark in the face of every man I meet.  I can put down the travel book.  I can pass on tasting each chocolate in the box.  There is nothing I need to be or do differently.  There is no shame, no blame, and no regret – because what is in front of me is enough.

Nancy