The Right Lessons

I don’t find regret to be particularly useful, though it’s sometimes difficult to avoid.

Regret can play a role in productive reassessment, triggering the reflex to look back and consider. I find that its knee-jerk utility often stops there, however, leaving me in a reflective-limbo; worrying over something that went wrong, but not doing anything useful with that information.

I have several habits meant to help close this deficit, but the most straightforward and boring one tends to be the most effective: I give myself a bit of time each day to do nothing but sit with my thoughts. Having that time is typically sufficient, though giving myself permission to set things aside once I’ve reassessed them through the lens of more experience and knowledge also seems to help.

Without that permission to move forward, it’s possible to reach to the reflection step and to get stuck there, held up and unable to progress because the critical act of determining how to do better in the future, and the also-critical act of forgiving oneself, are lacking.

I bring this up not because there’s anything in particular weighing on me, but because many of us are coming around to a year of our full-on pandemic reality, and it’s likely that we’ll want to reflect, but will also need to move forward in productive ways.

There’s a lot of uncertainty in our day-to-day and on the horizon. There have been a great many unusual variables influencing our behaviors, thinking, physical and psychological health, and the choices we’ve made along the way.

I will not be at all surprised if the many decisions I’ve made—from how I’ve chosen to spend my time, to what I’ve decided about the future—are soon called into question by the little brain-based voices that seem to exist solely to poke and prod at such things.

I’m attempting to preemptively prime my thinking with a reminder that context matters, that day-to-day realities during this bizarre period have been distinct and unusual and will probably seem like an easily dismissed dream at some point in the future—if I’m lucky, at least, because that will mean things got way better.

The idea is to make sure that when those nattering voices arise and ask me why I didn’t do this or that, why I didn’t do more, how I could justify spending so much time on tasks that will probably make little sense to future me—things like “making it through the day” and “taking long walks through unremarkable neighborhoods just to get out of the house and maybe have the opportunity to wave at a stranger”—I’ll have some answers.

I’m doing this so that I’ll, hopefully, be able to contextualize what I’ve been up to for the past year, so that I can learn what I need to learn from the experience even at the cognitive distance from which I’ll be viewing it, and so that I’ll be able to do so without unwarranted judgement or embarrassment that could mean learning the wrong lessons and making the wrong changes.

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