Her text brought an unexpected smile to my face. 

It’s July 4th and my younger sister reached out with a memory of the day we celebrated America’s bicentennial. Our ever-crafty Mom baked a couple dozen cupcakes and us neighborhood kids got to decorate them with the red, white, and blue frosting she made. We all got together by the old fence separating our yard from Dave Wooler’s yard and expressed our patriotic spirit in a very sweet way. 

I had forgotten all about that day but her text brought me right back into that moment. The faces, the voices…hard to believe it was 50 years ago.

Revisiting memories is often a double-edged emotional sword for me. Inevitably I will move past the memory itself and find myself fixated on the time separating the memory and the now. As in what have I done with my life in those years in between. As much as I’ve come to accept the path my life has taken, that nagging and quite persistent inquisitive voice within has the tendency to prompt me to revisit my path. The choices I made. The choices I didn’t make. The choices I never allowed myself to make.

Quite often this line of questioning was met with a tenacious hostile reaction from within, sort of the same reaction I experienced when I felt short of the paternal expectations I wasn’t living up to. I should have done better, and not knowing what better actually was didn’t let me off the hook for not doing so.

I was quite proficient at treating myself the way I was treated. 

In time, and with resilient intentionality, the hostility has been silenced. But the questions often remain. 

My path was my path, no matter how much I wished certain parts of the journey were different. But the path forward? That is mine to create if I am willing to do so. Regrets no longer derail me. They instead remind me where I have been need not determine where I am able to go. 

At some point in life you realize most of your life has statistically already happened. Urgency certainly does shape clarity, and clarity met with empowered action sets you on a path of intention and purpose. I can’t undo the collective heaviness of what I did, what I didn’t do, nor the things I never allowed myself to do. But I don’t have to carry that emotional burden into the next chapter of my journey.

I’ve had enough regrets for one lifetime.

Where I’m going is far more important than where I’ve been.

Photo by Sara Cervera on Unsplash

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