Campfyre Stories

(Warning, this starts without context on purpose.)

Lately, I’ve been hearing quite a few people say "You only regret things you actually did and not the things you didn’t do,"  but I just don’t buy it.

How many times have we all been faced with a decision "Do this now or walk away", walked away and spent time later on wondering what would have happened "if only…"?  Personally, I think that the biggest regrets of my life are for things I didn’t do, rather than things I did because, at least having done whatever, I know how it ended.

Years ago a friend of mine was approached by a man she knew fairly well.  "I need a wife," he said, "or they’re going to deport me."  She didn’t know what to do.  She went back and forth on the issue and she asked me what I thought.  I told her, "Well, if you do it, you may not be happy, it may turn out to be a bad situation, but if you don’t do it, you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering if you did the right thing."  And it was true.  Even though her "marriage" was a really difficult time in her life, even though it made her crazy and gave her all kinds of new issues to work through, at least she knows what happened.  Maybe it was a mistake, but it’s not so much a regret.

I mean, we’ve all made mistakes in our lives, but I’d hope that we also learned from most of them.  Do I regret having touched a hot stove when I was little?  Not really, because I learned why we don’t do that.  Maybe I wish I hadn’t burned myself, but if I hadn’t, then I’d probably run the risk of a greater injury somewhere down the line.

Talking about sex, I keep seeing people say that they’ve never met someone who regretted having waited until marriage.  I have.  I actually know a lot of people who regretted never having experienced someone other than their partner.  In fact, the only people I’ve heard of who regretted having sex didn’t regret having lost their virginity, they regretted the specifics - this guy, not using a condom, getting pregnant.  I mean think about the regrets you have for not having approached someone or given them your number compared to the number of regrets you have for acting on an attraction.  Honestly, which side has more?

For me, I think, 9 times out of 10 if I’m going to regret something, it’s because of inaction, not because of an action that turned out to be a mistake.  At least with mistakes, I know what the outcome was…

I don’t know, I’m just kind of rambling here.