The price we pay for being children of fortune, born of a billion unexpected blooms that overcame the incredible odds of nothingness and eternal night, is to acknowledge our complete cosmic helplessness. We have various ways to deal with it – prayer, violence, discipline – and we have no power to prevent accidents from happening, losses from collapse, galaxies from breaking.
Because our space of choice is so small against the greatness of luck, nothing worries human life more than the consequences of our decisions, nothing hurts more than the desire to wish to choose more wisely and more courageously – an opportunity not taken, a love not awakened, words not kind in the time of compassion. Regret — the fossilized fangs of it should soaked in the living flesh of is somethingsharp with sadness, cruel with self-criticism – it may be the greatest suffering we are capable of. It poisons the entire system of existence, because it eats away at what we are made of – time, entropic and irreversible. It stirs our longing, in the perfect words of James Baldwin, to “reconcile yourself with all the pain and wrongs of man” and stings with the reminder that in the end “man will be as irredeemable as all the days of the past.”
Therefore, there is no powerful spell against unhappiness like passing through the present in a way that shows remorse for the future – sincerely, humbly, wholeheartedly.
That's what George Saunders thinks about in some great passages from his 2007 collection of prophetic stories. Braindead Megaphone (public library).
In one of those figures that give the story its splendor, he writes:
You know that feeling at the end of the day, when the worries of what-should-I-have-to-do are gone… That moment when you think, Oh God, what have I done this day? And what am I doing with my life? And how should I change to avoid catastrophic end-of-life regrets?
[…]
At the end of my life, I know that I will not wish that I had been self-absorbed, inefficient, often standing at the festival, a little forgiven, spending many days ignoring the secret desires and fears of the people around me.
In a sense he will later delve into in his 2013 Syracuse commencement address, he adds:
So what prevents me from going out of my normal routine?
My mind, my limited mind.
The story of life is a story of the same basic ideas solving the same problems in the same ways that are already discredited.
In addition to a wonderful essay, he offers what may be the best recipe for breaking out of repetitive and mind-limiting issues:
Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to stay confused forever. Anything can happen. Stay open, forever, so open painfully, then open another, until the day of death, world without end, amen.
Couple that with artist Maira Kalman's illustrated meditation on how to find happiness on the other side of regret and Ellen Bass's epic poem “How to Apologize,” and revisit George Saunders' bravery of uncertainty.
