The Life We Did Not Live

“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.”

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

It is shocking to realize that I have lived more of my life than I have left to live.

There is more behind me now than ahead of me, and when I look back, I can see the places where my life might have gone differently.

• A decision I wish I had made sooner.

• Something I said and cannot take back.

• Something I should have said and didn’t.

• A relationship I stayed in too long, or perhaps left too soon.

• An opportunity I did not recognize until it had passed.

Most of us probably have our own version of that list.

When we are younger, regret often carries with it the possibility of repair. We can change direction, apologize, begin again, make a different choice the next time.

Later in life, some regrets are beyond repair.

The people involved may be gone. The opportunity has passed, there may be no next time.

And that may be when we begin to see regret differently.

The choices we would now make differently cannot simply be lifted out of our lives. Everything is connected to what came next.

This does not make the original choice good or right.

But if we could go back and remove one decision we deeply regret, what else would disappear with it?

• Who would we not have met?

• What would we not have learned?

• Who might we not have become?

We tend to imagine the unlived life rather generously.

We wonder whether, had we taken the other road, we might have been happier, more successful, less wounded.

The life we did not live never has to prove itself.

It remains untouched by disappointment, ordinary difficulty, and all the consequences we cannot imagine. We compare the complicated life we actually lived with another life that exists only in possibility.

And we do something else that is equally curious: we give the person we were then the knowledge of the person we are now.

The person standing at that crossroads did not have it.

We knew what we knew then. We had our particular fears and hopes, our loyalties and blind spots. We made choices from inside lives whose consequences had not yet happened.

It is easy to look back and think we should have known better.

Sometimes we should have.

Sometimes we understood more than we were able - or willing - to act upon.

Growing older does not require us to turn every regret into gratitude. Some things remain painful. Some choices harmed other people. Some losses did not secretly improve us.

Nor does wisdom require rewriting the past until everything that happened becomes necessary or good.

But neither do we have to keep putting the past on trial.

There is a difference between saying, I wish I had done that differently, and saying, My life would have been better if I had.

The first may be true. The second is something none of us can know.

We know the life we lived.

We do not know the life we escaped.

Kierkegaard’s observation is less cynical than it sounds. To choose one life is always to leave another unlived.

Some of what we call regret is grief for that unlived life, the road that remains perfect partly because we never had to walk it.

There is an uncomfortable question hiding in all of this:

If we could remove the choice we most regret, knowing that it would also remove everything that grew from it, would we?

We may continue to wish we had chosen differently. We may always wonder what might have happened if we had.

The question may not be whether we can make peace with the choices we made.

In may be whether we can regret them without assuming we know what the other choice would have given us.

The life we did not live will always have one considerable advantage over the life we did.

It never had to happen.