would you do anything different?
some of you may be familiar with the kenny chesney song “a lot of things different” — if not, lyrics are here.
my bgff and i were talking about regrets today, and whether we should ever regret anything. do you? many people say that they don’t regret anything, because if they *did*, they wouldn’t be who they are. the line in this song that always hits home with me says:
“if I’d a known that dance was going to be our last dance I’d a asked that band to play on and on on and on”
reason being this: the summer after my freshman year of college, i had a huge (hugely unrequited) crush on a kid i’d known my whole life. this crush started at a wedding dance of a couple friends of ours. we danced a handful of times and i couldn’t even tell you what he did or said, but i was crushing hard (i was 18. give me a break). this song was pretty popular that summer and every time i heard it that line played back in my head for a long time after. why? 6 days after that wedding dance he got paralyzed in a four-wheeler wreck. yeah.
i’m pretty sure he knew of my crush (if he didn’t, he was stupid, i was preeeeeeetty obvious) and i was a little heart broken when i realized it wasn’t gonna happen. but now, seven years later, i look back on it, shake my head, and go omg, bsg. what were you dooooooing?
when something in life goes in a direction you don’t want it to, it’s all you can think about. what happened, what went wrong, what you could have/should have/might have done differently. how could you have stopped it? but later, do cooler heads prevail? is that why people say they don’t regret anything? because they’ve looked the situation over again and realized that everything DID work out how it should have?
i’d like to change some of the stupid financial decisions i made when i was in college, but would i still be in the same happy place i am personally? or would i be in an even better place? or would i be in a WORSE place personally, but maybe better financially? who knows.
my point is this: in the last line of the song, kenny speaks these words: “i think we’d all do a lot of things different.” would we? is “I wouldn’t change anything because i wouldn’t be where i am now” a cop-out because it’s what we think we’re SUPPOSED to feel? What do you think?
I wrestled with this a long time ago the conclusion that I reached, which is the best thing for me, is that there is very little in my life that I regret. The stupid things I did — spending money on frivioulous things when I didn’t have it, being mean to someone I shouldn’t have been mean to, things like that — I view them as lessons learned, not regrets. Even bigger things, dropping out of a friends wedding three months before which ruined our incredibly close friendship, thats still a lesson learned that I grew from. Thinking I was transferring college and then having it fall apart just days before it was supposed to happen, not a regret. I would have regretted it more if I hadn’t tried but from that experience I ended up staying at the college I originally started at, was able to do an internship in the very city I wanted to transfer to and while it was a fun three months, I’m really glad that I didn’t move there for college at that time in my life.
I think there are always things that we question — what if, thats just a natural part of being human. I just take the things that most people would view as regrets and try to look back and see how they helped me grow as a person and what lessons I can take from them to help me make better decisions about my future. I don’t think its a cop out in the least, just a learning process.
We talked about this the other night (last night?) but I’m gonna put in my two cents anyway.
There are certain things that looking back, I wish I could change. BUT I realize that looking back on them, I didn’t have the strength or emotional maturity to do them differently. I was young and naive, and to some extent I still am, but those are things that really helped me grow up. They made me realize how important certain things are to me, and how unimportant other things are.
It’s weird, because I think I would definitely do some things differently, but had I done them differently, I would have already been the person I am today. So I guess they did make me who I am.
Huh.
I think that honestly, I’m too young to have an real massive and serious regrets. Anything I’ve done wrong I’ve really tried to learn from, and when I’ve been wronged it has taught be things about people I’m close to that I needed to know as soon as was possible.
I wouldn’t change things really, for now.
I think it’s hard to know what you would change without knowing how it would impact all that came after it. Like now, I might say “I wish I would have gone to a less expensive school,” but if I did, I wouldn’t have had the same doors open for me and who knows who’d I’d have met and where I’d be. I believe that everything is connected to everything else, and that you couldn’t go back and change one thing without everything else being different too.