I had a client say to me that she really regretted staying in her marriage for so long and putting up with behaviors, and situations that her husbands presented her with for over 25 years.

I asked her, I said ‘what allowed you to put up with it for so long’ and her answer was that she didn’t think she had a choice. Is she wrong about that? Did she have a choice?

At the time, yes, she did have a choice but the choice that she made was the only one and seemingly the right one for her to make at the time that she made it. You see back there then in those circumstances with the resources she had available, she had no other choice but to make the choice she did. How do we know she had no other choice? Because the evidence shows that she made ‘that’ choice at that time – so clearly she did what seemed right and logical at the time. Is there any point regretting it? No, because it doesn’t make one single iota of difference if she does – like all of us, the past is the past and cannot be changed.

We can all be so clever with hindsight it gives us 20/20 vision. ‘If’ we say, (and there’s that word ‘if’ again), ‘if I had known then what I know now I would never have done/allowed/behaved in that way.’ Well, if I had been my uncles brother I wouldn’t have been his niece! See how ridiculous ‘if’ statements are?

And that takes us back to regret. Regret is another wasted emotion that puts us in a position of pain and upset. Don’t ever regret. Everything you did and have yet to do is all part of the journey of learning. People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime. Each of them bringing with them, at just the right time, exactly what we need to learn during their time with us. Some people come and leave and then return at a later time because they needed the space in between to do and be what they needed to do. Some are brief interludes – may be a few dates, a chance meeting, a day spent at the spa, on a course or wherever. And yet important just the same. Some people stay a lifetime. Friends who go way back, children who never divorce you, parents who stayed for as long as they could. But all of them sent specifically for you to learn from.

I truly believe that you only regret the things you haven’t done, the love you didn’t give and the adventures you didn’t have. No one gets to the end of their lives and says ‘boy am I pleased I played it safe and didn’t risk even my little fingernail’. Every one says, ‘I’d like to have played harder, laughed longer, loved more passionately and thrown more caution to the wind’.

So just for today, just to experience what it would be like, live it full out. Take chances, speak out, do whatever you dare and don’t regret a single moment.

Till tomorrow,

Love Francine