Why is it so hard to make choices to change our lives—even changes we know are good ones? Why do we stay in bad relationships, hang onto bad eating habits, or stay at jobs where our energy is being sucked out from under us? Why do we keep saying “yes” to too many things, taking care of others at the expense of ourselves?
Why are we still putting off that business idea, or that book idea we’ve been harboring for years, or ignoring that nagging feeling?
Why don’t we pick up the phone and say hello, call that friend and apologize, text that family member to say we love them, finally share our opinion in a group of friends, or stand up for ourselves to that bully at work?
If you ask me it’s because life, if we’re going to live without regret, takes a huge dose of courage.
A life of love, not of fear.
A few years ago my husband and I were trying to make a big decision. The place we had been living and working for the past year wasn’t working for us anymore and we were seriously thinking about leaving. But as with anytime you’re about to make a major turn in your life, we were worried about taking the leap.
What would people think of the choice we were about to make? Would we disappoint people?
And mostly: was this the “right” decision?
Looking back, it’s hard to explain why we were so scared to pivot. I could list all the reasons to you, but they wouldn’t make sense. Fear is powerful but it isn’t logical. The fear doesn’t even make sense to us looking back. What I can explain is the deep, guttural feeling we had like we were supposed to leap.
We knew exactly what we were supposed to do. We were just terrified to do it.
We asked dozens of people for their advice and the responses we got back were mixed. Then we talked to a friend who finally had the guts to say to us what no one else would. He said: you can ignore that gut feeling gnawing inside you, but if you do, you’ll cut yourself from your very life force.
Your spiritual insight and energy, your creativity, and your joy will dissipate. You’ll die a slow painful, spiritual death.
Right as all of this was happening, my dad suffered a massive heart attack.
In fact, heart “attack” doesn’t really do justice to what happened. It was more like a massive heart failure. In an instant, his heart just stopped beating. They revived him six times before he even made it to the hospital and the doctors called my mom and told her to get the whole family there.
We all came to grips with the fact that he might not make it.
Wondering if my dad would survive long enough for me to even say goodbye brought up all kinds of feelings of regret for me. Should I have been more available? Should I have called more often? Should I have worked less? Should I have said, “I love you” more?
It also lit a fire under me. Life was so short and could not be wasted with frivolous fears and worries. The only thing that mattered was love: radical love for myself and those around me, love of life and all the gifts it brings. It was time to live without regret.
Miraculously, my dad survived.
And once we were all sure he was going to be okay, I asked him to tell me what it was like—nearly dying. He said something to me I’ll never forget. He said: you know, I’m sure it was so scary for you guys to have my life hanging in the balance, but it really wasn’t scary for me at all. I didn’t feel any fear. All I felt, he said, was total surrender.
In the moments when the ambulance crew was trying to revive him, when the whole family was scrambling to get to the where he was, when the doctors and nurses were struggling to keep him alive, while we were all terrified and distressed… he wasn’t distressed at all.
“It was so peaceful, nearly dying.” he said. “It’s living that’s the hard part.”
We all laughed because we knew what he meant. Now that he had the gift of life again, it was time to get on with all those dreams he had been deferring, all the ideas he’d been putting off, all the places he wanted to go and things he wanted to say… now was the time.
Life, if we’re going to live without regret, takes a huge freaking dose of courage.
And at the same time, maybe there was something he could learn about living from nearly dying. Maybe there is something we can all learn. Part of living with courage is learning to surrender to the flow of life, to let go of our ideas about how things are “supposed” to go and to embrace what comes.
Perhaps our version of “the perfect life” isn’t so perfect after all.
My 23-year-old sister in law was recently diagnosed with cancer.
And let me tell you, watching her receive her diagnoses, go through treatment, encounter obstacles with courage and conviction and keep a positive attitude the whole way has been both heart-wrenching and also beautiful. Heart-wrenching because of the pain she’s enduring and beautiful because, well, talk about freaking changing how you thought things were going to go.
A year ago, she and her husband (my husband’s brother) decided to make a move of their own, not so different from the move my husband and I made all those years ago. Their intuition was ramping up and telling them to go, so they did it.
They quit jobs and said goodbyes and packed their things.
They came to Nashville. They got a great deal on a house that needed some love, so they started gutting it for a total remodel. They knew this wasn’t going to be the most comfortable year of their life, and there was a lot of risk involved in this decision, but they did it, with courage and grace and conviction and beauty and no regrets.
That’s when the diagnosis came in.
I’ll be honest, if I were her, it would be so easy to throw my hands up in the air and say, “forget it! I give up! Life is out to get me. There is no way to win.” And yet she doesn’t seem to feel that way at all. Instead she told me: sometimes the suffering, more than the healing, is the greatest catalyst for our transformation.
Talk about courage and surrender to the way we thought things “should” be. Talk about the very embodiment of how we are so much stronger than we think.
Watching her journey has been yet another a wake-up call for me in my life—to stop worrying and being afraid of “bad” things that might happen to me and start paying attention to how powerful I am to face any number of obstacles that may come into my life. I say to myself, over and over again, “every experience in my life is an opportunity to learn.”
There are no guarantees in life. You have today.
What are you going to do with it?
Too many of us are tiptoeing around our own lives, trying not to piss too many people off or make too many waves. And I wonder if, when we get to the end of our lives—no matter when that happens—if that will be the very thing we regret most. I wonder how many of us will say, “I wish I would have spoken up sooner. I wish I would have made that move. I wish I would have… I wish I would have…”
And how few of us will say, “Wow, I really regret speaking up for myself or doing what was right for me or loving people radically and completely, or loving myself…”
What are we so afraid of?
I want to linger on this question for a minute because I think a lot of people ask it rhetorically but very few of us actually answer it. Obviously we’re afraid of something or we wouldn’t hesitate when it comes to taking steps toward things that matter to us.
- What keeps us from saying, “I don’t like how I felt when you said that…”
- What keeps us from quitting the job that no longer suits us?
- What keeps us from adopting that baby we’ve been dying to adopt?
- What keeps us from leaving that abusive relationship?
The answer, if you ask me, is this: we don’t trust ourselves enough.
We don’t trust our intuition to lead us in the direction we are designed to go.
When intuition speaks, when that internal engine starts to rev itself inside of us, we feel that gut-check or red flag that something should be different, when we get the sense it’s time move or time to change or time to speak up, we don’t act because we don’t trust ourselves. And we don’t trust ourselves because we break promises to ourselves every day.
Every time you say you’re going to do something and then do something different; each time you act outside of your conviction; every time you take care of other people at the expense of yourself; each time you say “yes” when you mean “no”; all those times you’ve let resentment build and strangle you, you’re chipping away at the trust you feel for yourself.
We are terrible friends to ourselves, terrible protectors of our own hearts. We’ve broken promises to ourselves again and again and again.
No wonder we don’t trust ourselves.
And I can hardly imagine how things might change if we realized how powerful we truly are. If we knew how the love and grace we desire to feel for ourselves has been with us all along, how the resources we need are at our fingertips, how every experience that comes across our path can be for our good if we will accept it.
I wonder what would change if we knew how much agency we have been given to overcome even the most challenging obstacles. Maybe we could trust ourselves more.
Maybe we would take that step of faith we’ve been dying to take.
Maybe we would stop worrying about regretting it.
Regret is just a feeling.
At the end of the day, regret is just a feeling. You’ll meet some people who will say, “I don’t believe in regret” or “regret is a waste of time and energy” but for one reason or another, this advice has always bothered me. Feelings of regret are something we all deal with and I’m not a big fan of denying feelings.
Also, regret can be a positive force in our lives if we let it.
First, let’s take some of the power out of the word by defining it. Regret is simply this: wishing you would have done things differently.
You will get to the end of your life and wish you had done things differently. That is a given. You might say, “I did everything I could with what I had, but with what I know now, this is what I would have done differently. I can have love and grace for myself, but if I had it to do again, here’s how I would have done that.”
We don’t have to fear regret or resist it or deny it.
But there are some things we need to know about regret.
- Regret is a tool, not a weapon. Think about this: a hammer is really effective for pounding nails into the wall but it is not meant for pounding your finger. Should we say, “hammers are dangerous and no one should ever be allowed to use them!” No. We just need to know what hammers are used for and exercise caution with them. The same is true with regret.
- Don’t allow yourself to ruminate. Thinking about situations you regret once or twice and saying, “wow, I wish I would have handled that differently” can be effective in curbing future behavior and avoiding additional regret. But obsessing over past mistakes again and again and again will keep you stuck. Learn to trust yourself and trust your process. We all make mistakes and are a work in progress.
- If you can correct course, do so. If you can’t, let go. There are some things we regret that we simply cannot change. If you’re a parent who wasn’t there for your kids, who are now grown, you can’t go back. What you have is now. And in order to live in the “now” you must let go of the past. If you feel regret and can use it (as a tool, not a weapon) to correct course, great. Apologize. Adjust. Change. Otherwise, forgive yourself and everyone else for not being perfect and choose to move forward with grace.
A few months ago I met a girl who was about to make a big decision.
She told me all about the positives and negatives and everything that was holding her back. She used words I would have used so many years ago when I was trying to make a choice for our next right step. I could hear the fear in her voice and I felt like this was a window, looking into the past of my very own life.
And what I told that girl—who was really me, if I could admit it—was this:
You are so deeply loved and more powerful than you can possibly imagine. You are protected in this world and so completely safe. Everything you feel you lack, you have access to in abundance. You can trust yourself. You will learn along the way, and that’s a blessing not a curse. It’s okay to be imperfect.
The world is opening it’s arms wide to you. There is no way you can mess this up. You are brave and beautiful and a work of art.
I just wish I could gift you the courage to see it.
Wow! You have written what I’ve always felt & then said it so eloquently, thank you!
That’s awesome! Thanks Janelle.
WoW! I loved this. Thank You!
Thanks Bobbi!
Confession: first time I’ve read your blog, won’t be the last. This aligns with some wisdom I just received as recent as yesterday. It not only confirms the phase of the journey I am in but the need to face the fear and not lose out on a window of opportunity in life. I appreciate your inspiration Allison. It made a difference for me today.
That’s so great, Eric. Really appreciate you reading and taking the time to comment. Welcome and hope we’ll see you around here more!
I had to laugh when I read the other two comments and the first word on each of them was “Wow”, because that is the word that popped into my head as I was reading your post! I guess there are a number of us that needed to hear this post and could relate to it. Thanks for the great reminder of many things you touch upon here! Now I am going to go back and read it again. 🙂
Michelle—I love that! Thanks for reading and so glad it came at a good time.
At almost 50, I can say that as painful as my regrets are, they have been my greatest teachers and have helped shape me into a better person than I used to be. They are a tool if we allow them to be. I don’t dwell on my regrets, but I sure do keep the priceless lessons they taught me right in the forefront of my mind, every single day. Thank you bad decisions…you have served your purpose. With God, truly no experience is ever wasted. Thank you for your beautiful post Allison.
What a great, perspective, Kate. We can use our regrets to our advantage if we are willing.
What a powerful message. I needed this today (and will bookmark for reference and send to others as well). Thank you so much for sharing!
Thanks Brenda!
THANKS ALLISON … For the memories … Blessings to you and yours! Doin’ good girl! =)
Thanks Rick!
Thanks Allison for your words…they ring so true and really relevant,
My friends and I just had a conversation about regrets and you expressed in this blog very beautifully what I struggled to find the words for. Thanks 🙂
That’s so great Milodie! Sounds like it came at an opportune time for many people. So glad you liked it and thanks for reading. Appreciate you.
While I love that you are inspiring people to stop being spectators of their lives and actually go after the true desires of their hearts, I have to remind you that you made one enormous error in your words of wisdom:
“You are protected in this world and so completely safe.”
False. I hate that we live in a world where this statement is false, but it is. You can do many wonderful things in this world, but never mistake comfort in your soul and in yourself with a comfortable world. This world is dangerous and we will all encounter those who have agendas to hurt and mislead others. We must be aware of this as we pursue our passions or else we will fall victim to schemes we don’t deserve.
But don’t let any of that hold you back. Be smart, be brave, and be willing.
Thanks for sharing your perspective, Gabrielle. I agree we must be wise as well as being brave. I also think choosing to believe we’re safe and protected in this world is an important aspect of BEING safe and protected. Our thoughts are working to create our realities. My two cents. You don’t have to agree with me. But it’s been an important part of my way forward.
Wise words. Thanks for bringing this up in your blog. As you said, regret is something we all deal with, and it can be a positive thing if viewed in the right context.
Thanks Michelle!
Thank you so much Allison for this life changing post.
I lost my dad this June he died of a heart attack ,its been a very difficult time for me.
Somehow these events awakened me to how short life is,I am at a point where I’m dissatisfied by a lot of things including my current job.I know very well what I’m capable of becoming and also what i should be doing ,i am saturated with ideas.My comfort and complacency have been rattled,It hurts me that i am not acting on my dreams but as you say,it is important to love and forgive ourselves.I simply cannot ignore my heart burning convictions.
Great post!!!
Praying for courage
Alison,
As the father of two teen girls, I found this article – particularly the very last part – powerful and pertinent. I shared it with both of them and hope they find it just as useful. Keep on writing and sharing – others’ comments says it all. Wow indeed!
wow, thank you, that was so good to hear, you’re really good at what you do, thank you!
I just found your blog, and read this article this morning. It literally brought me to tears. I’m in a period of significant transition, and a situation where any decisions I make hold a lot of fear. These words were ones I very much needed to hear today. Thank you.
Heya just wanted to give you a brief heads up and let you know a few of the images aren’t
loading properly. I’m not sure why but I think its
a linking issue. I’ve tried it in two different web browsers and both show the same outcome.
I’m just too happy that everything is in place for me now. I would gladly recommend the use of spell to any one going through marriage problems and want to put an end to it by emailing Dr Emu through emutemple@gmail.com and that was where I got the help to restore my marriage. Whatsapp +2347012841542
https://web.facebook.com/Emu-Temple-104891335203341
Wow that was unusual. I just wrote an really long comment
but after I clicked submit my comment didn’t show up.
Grrrr… well I’m not writing all that over again. Regardless, just
wanted to say excellent blog!
DR EMU WHO HELP PEOPLE IN ANY TYPE OF LOTTERY NUMBERS
It is a very hard situation when playing the lottery and never won, or keep winning low fund not up to 100 bucks, i have been a victim of such a tough life, the biggest fund i have ever won was 100 bucks, and i have been playing lottery for almost 12 years now, things suddenly change the moment i came across a secret online, a testimony of a spell caster called dr emu, who help people in any type of lottery numbers, i was not easily convinced, but i decided to give try, now i am a proud lottery winner with the help of dr emu, i won $1,000.0000.00 and i am making this known to every one out there who have been trying all day to win the lottery, believe me this is the only way to win the lottery.
Contact him on email Emutemple@gmail.com
What’s app +2347012841542
https://web.facebook.com/Emu-Temple-104891335203341
Hi there to all, how is all, I think every one is getting more from this website, and your views are pleasant designed
for new viewers.
Incredible points. Sound arguments. Keep up the good effort.
This is really interesting, You are a very skilled blogger.
I have joined your rss feed and look forward to seeking more of your
magnificent post. Also, I have shared your web site in my social networks!
I suffered from what they called peripheral artery disease (PAD). I have been suffering for years, Me and my wife searched for a medical cure, and then we came across a testimony of a man who suffered the same and was cured by Dr Chief Lucky. So my wife and I contacted Dr Chief Lucky via an email and thank God he replied. I explained what was wrong and he sent me herbal medicines that helped heal me completely. I am happy to say that herbal medicine is the ultimate and Dr Chief Lucky I am grateful. You can contact him on his email: chiefdrlucky@gmail.com or whatsapp: +2348132777335, Facebook page http://facebook.com/chiefdrlucky website https://chiefdrlucky.com/. He said that he also specializes in the following diseases: ALS, CANCER, HPV, HERPES, DIABETES, HEPATITIS B, HIV, And more.
EFFECTIVE LOVE SPELL TO GET EX HUSBAND/BOYFRIEND OR EX WIFE/GIRLFRIEND AND CURE HERPES AND INFERTILITY THAT WORKS WITHIN 24 HOURS. WIN LOTTERY POWERBALL/MEGAMILLIONS 100% GUARANTEED
Contact Dr. Odunga at odungaspelltemple@gmail.com OR Whats App/CALL +2348167159012
I got my ex husband back to me and also got fertile and gave birth to twin girls after 12 years of marriage.
When I came online last year, I saw a testimony about Doctor ODUNGA and how he has been helping people with marriage issues and I decided to contact him. We spoke on email at odungaspelltemple@gmail.com and later he gave me his WhatsApp number which is +2348167159012. He assured me he would help me get my ex husband back after 3 years of no contact. Doctor Odunga is the best spell caster I must say. My husband called me after 24 hours of contact. The third day, I received natural herbs for fertility and after using it, I became fertile and conceived. I and my husband reconnected, had sex and I was pregnant. Presently I am happy to say I am the mother of twin girls and this is ALL THANKS TO DOCTOR ODUNGA. I came online to say this If you need help, I believe you are saved with this man.
Contact his email at odungaspelltemple@gmail.com
OR Whats App/Call +2348167159012 and you too will give a testimony too to help others