Regret Free Living

Regret Free Living

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

The Rev. C. Scot Giles, D.Min.

September 5, 2021

The Black List

In 2016 when I was the President of the Unitarian Universalist Society for Community Ministries, the professional association for UU community clergy like myself, the officers of the Board got together to ask me if I ever watched the TV show The Black List on NBC. 

I had not actually seen the show because I don’t really watch a lot of television. That’s an occupational hazard when you work in a helping profession. You work when other people don’t - evenings and weekends are your busiest times. 

“Well, you really should,” they said. “Because you are just like Raymond Reddington,” who was the character played by actor James Spader on the show. 

I really didn’t know how to take that. When I checked I discovered that the character of Raymond Reddington was a murderer and criminal mastermind on the show. So saying I was just like him was not exactly high praise from a group of ministers. 

But I started to watch the show, and I did sort of get it. Reddington is drawn as the classic “bad boy” character, who lives by his own code and is willing to ignore the rules of society if they don’t match. It’s what we used to call the “outlaw” type when I was a motorcyclist, and I while I am not have have never been a criminal mastermind, I do sort of fit the mold of living by my own code.

On a recent episode of The Black List (season 8, episode 21 for those who want to see it) the actor, speaking in the character Raymond Reddington, said something that inspired my sermon today. He said, “As a rule I don’t live with regret…”

That got me thinking, because I don’t live with regret either. So that is what I want to talk about today.

To Err Is Human….

In 1711 English poet Alexander Pope wrote in his An Essay on Criticism, that “to err is human.”

“Ah ne’er do dire a Thirst of Glory boast, 

Nor in the Critick let the Man be lost!

Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join;

To err is Humane; to Forgive Divine.”

Most often this quote is cited to encourage forgiveness, as it’s plain meaning is that everyone makes mistakes so we really should cut each other some slack. 

While that is certainly true, the phrase “to err is human” is true just on it’s own. In fact, I would champion a stronger formulation - “all living things make mistakes.”

Human learning is not like machine learning. When you program a computer to do something you already know how it should be done, and you set up the machine to do exactly that and nothing else. Provided it is functioning properly, the machine never makes a mistake. It can’t.

Computerized Artificial Intelligence works differently. With it, a computer program learns that same way that a living organism learns. 

Among living creatures learning starts at birth, and functions by trial and error. 

Some lessons, for example, touching a hot stove, are learned immediately. Some require multiple experiments until we figure things out. All learning requires experimentation.

Later, we may experience education, where lessons learned by others through their experimentation are passed to us, so we don’t have to repeat their mistakes and can benefit from their experience.

The thing to get is that learning is rooted in trial and error, either personal trail and error or by absorbing accounts of the trial and error of other people. We don’t come set up to do things exactly right. We have to make mistakes or we learn nothing. 

A professor of mine years ago compared the process of human learning to the flight of a missile toward a target. The missile has a guidance system. If the missile is on target toward its goal, the guidance system is off. If the missile gets off target, the guidance system activates and adjusts something so that target acquisition is recovered. A missile does not travel toward its target in a straight line. Instead, it zigs and zags as the guidance system turns on and off. 

That is to say the missile makes mistakes as it heads toward its target, and its guidance system functions by correcting those mistakes. That is how Artificial Intelligence learns, and it’s how all living creatures learn.

Hence my formulation, focusing here on living creatures instead of advanced computers, that “all living things make mistakes.”

The result is that every one of us has a long list of memories about where we messed something up. We have this list because that’s part of being alive. All learning comes to us by some form of trial and error. All learning comes to us by trying something out, messing it up, and hopefully learning from those mistakes.

The problem is we feel regret.

Regret

Regret is the feeling of sadness we get when we think of something that either didn’t go as we hoped, or we think of an outcome that didn’t manifest because of choices we made.

Regret is a physical process. It arises from activity in the orbitofrontal cortex of the brain (the front lobes, right behind the eyes). Brain scans of sociopaths show they have little activity in that area of their brains. Most of us have a lot.

Sigmund Freud thought regretful feelings were healthy. He believed such feelings were the mind’s goad to correction. Given that sociopaths and psychopaths apparently feel no such impulse, he was probably right about that. 

But too much of anything is a bad thing. I recall a popular Science Fiction television show called Babylon Five, were there were a race of invisible aliens who could control a person’s behavior. They clung, invisibly to one’s back and stretched invisible tentacles into the mind. 

Having a lot of regrets about your life is sort of like that. You carry them around. Others can’t see them but they are there, and they do control you by forcing you to hide who you really are, what you really think, and what you really hope. It destroys your self-confidence. What is self-confidence if not the willingness to put yourself forward in the expectation that you will be sufficient to meet the challenges and do okay.

Psychologists tell us that regret is one of the most common emotions. In a recent study published by the American Psychological Association, titled “Commonly Named Emotions in Everyday Conversations,” by Susan Shimanoff (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1985-00832-001) it was found that regret is the second most frequently mentioned emotion in everyday talk, love being the most frequent.

The most common regret people mentioned was romantic regret, either about the “one who got away,” or “the one who didn’t get away but in retrospect we wish had.”

Another theme was education, either not have gotten an education, or regret at not having studied something that one realized would have been fulfilling - majoring in business administration instead of art, as an example.

Self-Blame

Another common theme is regret for roads not taken in life. We all make choices about what to do and what not to do. It’s natural to wonder if perhaps things might have gone better if we chose what was behind Curtain B instead of the one we did choose. That’s the meaning of the poem, Maud Muller by John Greenleaf Whittier. What might have happened if the Judge had gotten off his horse and let himself spend time with Maud. What might have happened if she had walked over to him and smiled instead of politely brushing him off.

There are some things we cannot know. One of those things is what might have happened. It’s always possible for us to have done something other than what we did do. But it’s an open question if the result would have been better or worse. 

“What might have happened” will always be locked away behind a mystery we cannot solve. We can only deal with what we did do and giving energy to thinking about what might have happened is a really effective way to make yourself miserable. 

As psychologist Tara Brach recounts in her book Radical Acceptance, self-blame shuts down the learning centers of the brain which results in our becoming less than we might otherwise have become. 

In 2019 hospice nurse Bronnie Ware published a book that everyone should read, titled The Top Five regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing. She recounts that having listened to people list what they regretted about their lives as the end neared, she was motivated to change her own course.

The five regrets:

“I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

This one really resonates with me because I’ve heard it so often among the more gravely ill of my clientele. 

There is an old saying that comes out of the human potential movement - “You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.” That is, you don’t need the approval of other people. You can actually do what you want. But if you mistakenly believe you need the approval of others, you will never get enough, because there will always be people who will withhold approval in order to manipulate you.

If I had wanted the approval of my family of origin, I would have fulfilled their, clearly articulated, script for my life. They wanted me to become a janitor at a bakery. The shop was called Oronoque Orchards Bakery, and they make great pies and brownies to this day. Practically the whole family worked for owners. I was supposed to as well. Sweeping up. Other, more important future roles at the bakery were assigned in the family imagination to other people they valued more. I’m glad I decided as a boy that they were full of it and not worth taking seriously. 

“I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. I get that. I’m glad I didn’t do that.

A second regret nurse Ware reported was “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.” For a workaholic like me, this one is difficult to hear. But I’ve heard it said again and again. Work isn’t everything. Career isn’t everything. Don’t neglect the people and things you love.

“I wish I had the courage to express my feelings,” was a third common regret. When the end is near, many feel remorse for the things they left unsaid. 

“I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends,” came in fourth. The fifth was a profound regret. “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

That last was one of the insights of the Buddha. The cause of suffering is craving things you don’t have, and perhaps will never be able to have. It is a better path to want what you have been able to give yourself, and be content with that - to celebrate that. I often read in the book Walden by Henry David Thoreau. 

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours,….I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”

To live without regrets is to free yourself from all of these things. It probably isn’t possible to be completely without regrets. Freud was right, regret does help goad us toward self-improvement. However, it is certainly possible not to live with unnecessary regrets, and I have two magical spells to share with you that can help you do exactly that.

Harry Potter

Unless you’ve been living inside a deep cave for the past twenty years, you know the tales of Harry Potter by author J.K. Rowling.

A young boy who was secretly a wizard, discovers his magical abilities and goes on to avenge his parents and save the world from domination by an evil power.

There actually is a real Harry Potter, in that J.K. Rowling has since said that she based the character on a young boy she knew named Ian Potter who lived four doors down from her own childhood home, and who had a real gift for getting into mischief. 

While the characters in the books by Rowling and the movies based on them are delightful, and recalled many of us to our own childhoods, the real fun of the stories is the magic spells.

Everyone who is magical in that fictional world carries a magic wand of some sort and by flicking it with just the right touch while reciting an incantation in dog Latin, can make special things happen. Like the levitation spell the character Hermione loved, “Wingardium Leviosa,” which actually comes from the Latin root words, “wing” and “levi,”  meaning “flight” and “lift.” respectfully.

Well, there are psychological and spiritual magical spells, and I’ve seen more than one magic wand on display in a counselor’s office as a way of illustrating exactly that.

Language controls conscious thought. If you do not have language for something it is almost impossible to think about it. This is why theoretical physicists have to invent whole lexicons to describe subatomic particles that cannot be directly observed. If they don’t have words for them they can’t think about them.

This is true of a lot of things. The German language has more words for describing objects moving in space than almost any other language. Perhaps that is why German culture has produced magnificent engineers. The French language has more words for describing nuances of emotion than other languages, and so French culture is sensual, emotional and psychologically rich. 

Words are important. In our culture, patriarchy stunted the linguistic development of most males. We’re told from the time we are young boys not to talk about our feelings - “don’t be a sissy,” or “man up.” The result is most males get to adulthood and do not have a rich emotional vocabulary and have trouble explaining how they are feeling, and too often, stop trying - typically to the dismay of their Significant Others.

But then there are spells. I want to share two spells with you today that can help deliver you from unnecessary regret. They are not mine. They come from the work of Ormond McGill, who was called during his lifetime the “Dean of American Hypnotists.” 

Because he did not possess academic accomplishments and made his living as a stage performer, few outside of the hypnotic community know of him. He died in 2005 at the age of 92, and he was the person who inspired me to study hypnosis when I saw him perform when I was ten years old.

I would come to know Mr. McGill. He taught me what I am about to teach you, and the lesson transformed my life.

The First Spell

The very first spell has three words. Up To Now.

Whenever you find yourself ruminating on a regret about something that you attempted that didn’t turn out as well as you hoped, instead of thinking “I failed,” or “I messed up,” use this spell. Say “Up to now, I’ve failed at that,” or “up to now, I’ve messed that up.”

By adding the all-important qualifier, “up to now” you remind your own deeper mind that the future is actually open and that the past has no power to control your future except the power you give it by allowing it to influence what you do in the present.

That fact that you messed the recipe up ten thousand times when you tried to make a dish, doesn’t mean that the next time you try will also fail. It could be spectacular. That’s happened in my kitchen more than once.

The fact that you have not been able to have a great long-term romantic relationship with someone in the past, doesn’t mean that the next one will also fail. It could be good. It could be great.

The spell, “Up To Now,” if you will use it consistently will resolve a lot of the regrets you may have about things that have gone wrong in the past.

I Learned A Lot From That

The second spell is longer. It has six words. Those words are to say to yourself “I learned a lot from that.”

This is the spell I use to deliver myself from shame and embarrassment about things I’ve done that didn’t go the way I’d hoped. 

I tried something and it flopped. I had an inspiration that actually turned out to be dumb. I fell for a trap set for me by someone who wanted my humiliation. It’s possible to over-focus on such things to the point where the regret about them paralyzes one.

Instead, when such recollections come to mind, I add “I learned a lot from that.” 

And I did. I learned what I should not do again. I learned to be more aware of my surrounding and the motivations of the people I am with. I learned how to be a better friend, or lover, teacher or student. I learned a lot by zig zagging my way to the target.

The Spells Work

I’ve done things I wish had gone differently, but I’ve learned from every one of them, and therefore they have made me better than I was. 

I’ve had my share of failures, things I’ve tried and up to now have not figured out. But eventually I may get them right and when I do I’ll be ahead of the game.

Up To Now. I Learned A Lot From That. Not quite as fancy as Herminone’s Wingardium Leviosa, but they’ll do because these spells work to banish regret.

And that’s my sermon.