If I had died in that very moment
on consciously choosing what to regret
Two inches.
That was how close a car was from swerving completely into me. The lady behind me muttered, “oh shit” three times with her face turning into a shade of pale I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. She was two inches close to witnessing what it would be like to see a human body completely give way to a moving metal machine.
I looked at her and smiled. And I continued crossing the road.
It was surreal, not because I was two inches away from getting completely pulped. It was that I almost didn’t react to it. I checked my internal state of mind — was I in some denial?
If I had died, in that very moment. I would die without much regret. I don’t think it is possible to have absolutely no regrets. I have lived an approximately twelve thousand days in my relatively short lifetime, and it would be a lie to say that out of those twelve thousand days, there was not a single second that I felt like something could have gone the other way.
For every step of the way, every decision we make, it is having to choose a single branch at any given moment out of the possible branches. With every branch taken, there are always the “what if”s for the rest of them.
Here is what I have learned, in my twelve thousand days of life. It is not about eliminating regret, but it is about choosing the ones we can live with and not the ones we cannot. It is about understanding what it means to undertake a growing bag of emotional burden on our shoulders out of our own free will and yet proudly stride forward with conscious determination.
It is about choosing what we want to put in that bag. Jeff Bezos calls it the “Regret Minimization Framework”. I think I have a slightly different slant on it. I call it the “take on as much conscious regret as possible in order to move forward with what you actually don’t want to regret” framework.
It is emotionally difficult for me, to live eight thousand miles away from my family. I consciously know that there will be a day when I will come to regret not having spent more time with them or having done more for them. My heart will break, and there will be an enormous sense of guilt.
But to me, love is not about being paralyzed by a fear of loss. For me, it is about being willing to undertake that loss in order for love to not only to exist within my own circle, but trying to take that energy and exponentially multiply it for the world.
Love that is bound by blood is powerful. So is the love that binds humanity. It is the love for our fellow human beings that makes firefighters sacrifice themselves, that makes a man save 669 kids in the middle of war despite having no relation to them, that makes countless people in the world work tirelessly to save our ecology so that the rest of us can continue to abuse our resources.
If I had died in that very moment, I would have very little regret. I know it would be cruel to the people who love me.
At the very least, I know and I hope they know this. That I cannot say I had lived an extraordinary life, I cannot say that I have made the best out of what I have been given, I also cannot say that I was always kind and responsible, but here is what I can say. I can say that I had done my best to grow, to be a better person and human being, that I may not have made the best choices but I was always willing to choose.
I have also tried my best to love this world, even if I have issues loving myself or even life itself. I have also consistently made myself see the love and hope that exists and not take the easy way of resignation and hence absolving myself of all responsibility to try to make the world we live in, better.
Most of all, I was unafraid to love, unafraid to be true, even that means having to break myself apart, unafraid to try to be the best version of myself, even though I have to roll myself back sometimes and start over.
This is what I would think if I had died in that very moment, and this is what I hope to be thinking, for my true last moment.
