I remember playing Frogger, glued to the rickety Atari 2600. I developed a feel for when to go and when to stop, but there were always openings that only stayed open for the flick of a thumb and others that were usually there and then suddenly weren’t.
I had to pay attention and feel for the right next move. Or I’d be flattened.
I don’t have regrets. But my heart aches. Daily. And not about Frogger. I’ve lived long enough and have perhaps cultivated some degree of wise surrender to the truth that you can never go back. Everything is temporal, ephemeral, gone. To cling is to suffer. And regret feels silly as emotions go.
I’ve aways loved words. I love how bad we are at them and how readily humans will ascribe meanings that become increasingly inaccurate, but whose uptake in society is inversely proportional. The less precise, the more ubiquitous a word seems to become. Think “ironic” or “chagrinned.”
In her essay, In the Service of Life, Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen uses brilliantly few words to explore the difference between service and helping. I use this essay in many of my classes. There is always a student who wants to argue with me, or really with Dr. Remen, about what their definition of helping is and how they’re cool because clearly this article isn’t talking about them. Cool man. You do you. Over there. In the dark. Hiding behind semantics is like refusing to RSVP to your own awakening.
You can call it snots and phlegm for all I care. The words aren’t what’s important. What’s important is that these things are not the same—service and helping. Dr. Remen is pointing to two very distinct possibilities of how we can feel inside ourselves when we engage in an act that is supportive of another person. One is depleting and incurring of debt. The other is reciprocal and nourishing. The same act can be experienced in either way depending on the stories to which the doer is anchored.
For me, this would be like regret and aching.
Regret stops you in your tracks. It feels like the inexorable pull of wishing you hadn’t or that you had. There’s an impediment to moving forward when we anchor to regret, at least as we use it culturally. The actual definition is in the neighborhood of something I can get behind. Our pals at Merriam-Webster come closest: “sorrow aroused by circumstances beyond one's control or power to repair.” I suppose that is what I mean when I say my heart aches, but I don’t think that’s what people mean when they say they regret a thing. I wouldn’t change the things that make my heart ache and I won’t waste my breath or love on wishing to change the unchangeable, which is every single thing that has ever gone before.
If you lined up the sorrows in my life like a menu and offered them to my 15-year-old self, I would not likely choose very many of them. I might actually still be in my room. Under the bed. At 49, I feel pretty clear that the fork in any of those roads would have been just as likely to end up in my eye.
Wherever you go, there you are.
If there is a thing I would undo and that I truly wish I could go back and not, it is the nasty, anti-Semitic thing I parroted at one of my 7th grade classmates for no real reason. It’s so gross, I won’t repeat it, even though that’s exactly what I did then—repeated something that got a laugh at home. Oy. Well, and then maybe I wish it hasn’t taken another 15 years to understand that I could be funny without casualties, but again, the list is small of things I truly regret if the crux is about wishing I could undo them.
I love movies like Sliding Doors, Crash, Magnolia, Short Cuts. The characters essentially flop into and over and around each other, untying and binding and otherwise making a mess and not-so-mess of each others’ lives, mostly without meaning to and definitely without understanding the inextricable connectedness and ripple of their actions. Movies like this feel like a gentle pat on the heart. “See, dear?...this shit is all connected. Yes, in beautiful and nourishing ways like mushrooms underground and also in deeply painful and regrettable ways that we could just about never prevent or fully understand.”
Each of these movies more than paid for itself at the box office because humans saw themselves in these beautiful, tragic, real, painful stories. We all ache.
There are scenes, moments, decisions from my life that are printed upon my cells. I can call them up or a waft of Estée Lauder’s Beautiful or a few notes of Say Something lifts them into my consciousness. These moments are precious. I remember devouring Susan Cain’s Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole when it came out in 2022. She had already broken me open with her other gem Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, so I was ready for whatever she could do to explain me to myself. Oh, how I’ve searched. (Remind me to tell you the story about my teenager railing, “I’m not gonna learn who I am from a book!” Oh, my love. You’re right. Probably not one book.) It was a gorgeously useful read that left me feeling…well, sorrow. And I was glad for it. She expertly revealed the deep truth that "the nub of human heartache and desire, regardless of your religion, birth country, personality" connects us.
When I think back to the times when I’ve been trapped by the unrelenting desire to “not be here anymore,” but the equally palpable sense that I didn’t have the courage to end my life, I don’t want to move away from that and I don’t want to undo it. I lived there. I lived through that. I want to remember it and channel it into how I understand my fellow humans.
That night, in the dark, our faces lit by passing cars in the road in front of the house we had shared for 15 years, when I fell backwards into a night that would last the next three?...even now, when I conjure it up, my forehead beads with sweat and my heart races a bit. Terror. The rudder was broken. I floated and crashed and scattered away into what would be next. Deep, suffocating not-knowing. That feeling was not just mine. It was borrowed from so many others before me.
And when I came up for one of the fullest breaths of air I had taken possibly in my whole life and started to set small, new boundaries, I had lost so much. It was so completely obliterated it couldn’t be repaired. And I was new. I had shed. I had grown. My wings were wet, but I trusted them and I still ached. I ache now.
I will die aching.
If I regret anything, it’s the pain that many of the steps on my own journey have made available to others. And then, being very careful to take only the responsibility that is mine, I remember that they, too, ache and wonder and consider what would have happened had they taken the fork. I didn’t cause anything. Our paths crossed and the intersection warped things, grew things, dissolved things. And it wasn’t always this wrecker I call “me” who did the bending. Lines do intersect in nature without disrupting each other on the regular. But so many of us can’t help but satisfy our curiosity. Something crazy would have to happen for that fork to wind up in my eye. Right? And so we ache.
We are each other’s teachers. Some teachers smack our knuckles till we get it. Some teachers stay up all night with us sliding the M&Ms and sweater buttons across the grid over and over until the equation looks like it’s starting to make sense and then they step away to make some tea when it’s clear we just need another minute to ourselves and then we’ll have it.
I want so much for the people I love to know I love them. I ache for their happiness. I ache for them to feel resolved in their hearts. I want them to know how deeply I regret the pain that has come their way as an ingredient of the cakes we’ve made together and, in some cases, still try to make. Most of all, I want them to know they don’t ache alone. We may ache for different aspects of the same experiences, but we still share ache.
We ache because we love and because we live.