I was having sushi with a business associate the other day when the subject of regret came up. 

My colleague, who is much younger than me, said, “I really don’t have any regrets.  It’s not that I haven’t done things I wish I hadn’t done, it’s just that I made the best decisions I could at the time based on what I knew, and what I was capable of, at that moment. 

“And besides, I’m in a good place now, and maybe I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the mistakes I made earlier.”

There was something oddly familiar about her comments, and then I remembered that I used to say almost precisely the same thing when I was in my twenties. 

But I haven’t said it in years. 

Suddenly, a wintry image, or rather a progression of images, appeared before my mind’s eye: I pictured myself speeding down a highway through a very light and whirling and intermittent snow, so light that I couldn’t be bothered to turn on my windshield wipers. 

For the first few miles, the feathery flakes just blew away in front of my advancing windshield.  I felt vindicated, in an odd way, in my decision not to use the wipers.

Clearly, they weren’t needed.

All along, of course, a few random flakes here and there would stick to the glass, and a few droplets of mud as well.  But it didn’t make any discernible difference.

Even after 25 miles or so, though the windshield could have been cleaner, I suppose, the view remained completely unobstructed. 

But somewhere around the 50-mile mark, though the snowfall wasn’t any heavier than before, I realized that some terribly important line had been passed, though I hadn’t at all noticed it, many miles back. 

The line, of course, was the one between clarity and confusion.

The windshield was no longer perfectly clear. 

Nor, for that matter, was it kind of dirty but still more or less clear enough to see through. 

No, it was utterly begrimed with a thick layer of snow and melting snow and ice and pulverized road salt and sleet and mud thrown up by the wheels of the cars and trucks in front of me, so much so that, very suddenly, I realized I had to turn on the windshield wipers immediately to avoid veering into an oncoming lane and crashing.

This all flashed through my mind in just a fleeting second or two, but after my lunch, I spent some time thinking about this series of images.

Or, I should say, this spontaneously generated metaphor, in which the encroaching grime represented the accumulation of regrets and mistakes and missed opportunities, and each mile a year of my life, and the instant when I was forced to turn on the wipers that chilling flash of insight when I first realized that “I don’t have any regrets because I did the best I could” was, although a perfectly reasonable thing for someone in their twenties to say, an utterly inadequate and pointless one for someone in their forties or fifties.

Regrets, needless to say, reside in the past. But because there are no U-turns allowed anywhere on this road, the past being unattainable, regrets only matter so far as they affect the future. 

That’s why the view out of the front windshield matters so much more than the one out of the back:  We begin to discern patterns in our past behavior, and find ourselves avoiding, or fearing, similar situations going forward.  We peer around the huge dark and messy areas that we don’t want to gaze upon because they’re too painful, and look only through the few remaining clear spots. 

Pretty soon, we can barely move at all. 

Here, of course, is where the metaphor breaks down.  Because there are no “wipers” that I can think of that can instantaneously clear the view, the way that real windshield wipers can. 

In fact, I believe it is probably impossible for any reasonably intelligent person not to have accumulated a number of regrets, because intelligence implies an ability to consider alternatives, and going down one road instead of another means you’ll never know what that other road could have been like. 

And of course, that “other road” leads to other paths, and those to still others, into the millions.  Over the course of a lifetime, the ratio of roads taken to roads untaken becomes almost agonizingly small.  The one road, and the one view, that our existences narrow down to, may be perfectly pleasant, or even wonderful.

But it’s only one. 

And everything else, every other prospect, and every other view, is dark.

Back in college, my very first car had been a sky-blue 1965 Ford Mustang with so much rust that it was almost more brown than blue.  I had purchased this classic car for 50 bucks from my then-roommate and still-best-friend. 

The Mustang had worn-out wipers and a malfunctioning heater, and I drove around for a week or two in the middle of a brutal Midwestern winter hunched over and peering out of a tiny crescent of windshield just above the steering wheel that remained clear thanks to the feeble bit of heat thrown off by the engine. 

Finally, I accumulated enough money from my job as a busboy at a local restaurant to buy a new heater and some replacement blades, and pretty soon I was driving in high style, and not long after that, it was spring. 

The car I have now, on the other hand, has pretty much every accessory I could ask for, including some that are so advanced, I’m not even sure what they’re there for. 

So — to examine this metaphor from another angle — I’m better able to deal with disappointments and regret because at this stage of my life, I have more resources at my command.

And the reason I have more resources is because — beginning with that minimum-wage busboy job — I took action. 

I took some good roads, and I took some bad ones, but I kept moving forward and all in all, I arrived at a place where, even though I couldn’t wipe away past regrets, I could at least balance them out with some present accomplishments.  I’ve had a good life, and, despite a rather bad upbringing, a pretty fortunate one. 

Nonetheless, I have failed to reach some of my most cherished goals, particularly as a writer. 

And so, as we approach the end of the year and the beginning of the season of resolutions, I choose to make this one: No mater what regrets I may have accumulated, I will continue to move forward. 

To take action. 

And to pursue accomplishment, no matter how difficult or distant it may seem.

It’s the only thing I can do. 

It is, I believe, the only thing worth doing. 

 

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