Moving Through The Fog - Put Regret In The Closet

Moving through the Fog - Put Regret in the Closet

WHILE I WAS in Chicago on business, one of my business associates asked me to join her in some “hat shopping” one Saturday afternoon. The boutiques in a given area of town were having a “Mad Hatters” event, displaying all styles, sizes, and colors of headwear options.

We laughed our way through literally hundreds of hats—floppies, straws, velvets, pill boxes, you name it—we tried it on. But the longer we shopped and modeled for one another, the more maw-ve-lous we believed we became. Six hours later, after losing all objectivity, we purchased our hats. I wore mine only once: Steve kept referring to me as Raisa (as in Gorbachev’s wife), so I haven’t dared don it again. But I keep it. In my closet. In a box, high on a shelf. I don’t open it, but I know it’s there. It offers me an important reminder: hats aren’t for me.

We all have regrets. Whether it stems from a poor fashion choice or a moral failure, regret is one thing we have in common. Our differences surface in the manner we choose to deal with our mistakes.

Coming to grips with a disappointment, some of us appropriately mourn the loss but then make the mistake of wallowing in the regret. This rumination on our past failings only thwarts the forward momentum to recovery. You can’t throw your mistake away—as much as you might like to sometimes—because it is part of the fabric of who you are. But like I did with my hat, you can shelve it. Because you might need to call on the experience again (in order not to repeat the mistake), regret should not be so far from your recall that you can’t benefit from your previous intimacy with the associated heartache. But your disappointment should never become your “life theme.”

Consider how psychologist Albert Bandura explains the effects of a downward spiral in Marcus Buckingham’s book The One Thing You Need to Know: “Memories of negative events increase despondency, and despondency lowers self-efficacy beliefs; the lowered beliefs, in turn, weaken motivation and spawn poor performance, breeding an even deeper despondency in a downward cycle. So if you really want to ruin your chances of sustained success, ponder your weaknesses, ruminate on your past failings, chew on your flaws.”^a

The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul. (Psalm 23:1-3, NASB)

God wants you to live a full and meaningful life—even if you did buy a stupid-looking hat. Put it in a box.

^a Marcus Buckingham, The One Thing You Need to Know (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 189.