Along with guilt, regret is another emotion I seem to lack.  (Hum along: Edith Piaf's "Non, je ne regrette rien.")  It's not that I haven't made (more than?) my share of stupid decisions, often costly (in all senses) ones.  It's partly that I tend not to focus on the past--not that I don't have 60+ years of wonderful memories that I often revisit, but I lived them once.  I don't live them again.  I don't revisit them as a tourist exactly, but more as if they were a storehouse, a source of stories that I can retell for effect (humorous, impressive, shocking).  And I know that the stories are often constructs that have hardened into narratives that have taken on their own lives. I don't feel regret too because it's a useless emotion; no amount of regret will change the past.  There's a third reason as well.  In the American lit. survey class, I always taught Henry James, much to the irritation of most of the students.  (I always liked the comment on James that he "chewed more than he bit off.")  We usually read "The Beast in the Jungle," a story of the unlived life--a story in Henry James's late, difficult style in which nothing happens (that's the point of the story, but small consolation to the students), with a protagonist, the ironically named John Marcher, who doesn't even saunter anywhere, who sees himself as being "supremely unselfish," all the while thinking only of himself, and who is thus extremely unlikable.  I always wanted also to teach what I saw as a companion story, "The Jolly Corner" (I refrained and spared the students.)  In that story, the protagonist returns to his abandoned house in New York after having spent his adult life in Europe.  There he encounters a ghost that haunts and frightens him.  He keeps returning to the house, and each time the ghost confronts him.  What he realizes at the end is that the monstrous ghost is not an other, but rather what and who he would have become. 

It seems to me that when most of us think "if only, I'd..." or "had I but known, I would've..." what we imagine is someone who is like what we are today, just happier or richer or more successful.  In "The Jolly Corner," what the protagonist realizes is that he would have become someone very different.  I'm happy with who I am and with my life, so having regrets, wishing I'd done things differently implies that I'd like to be someone different.

A more biting critique of looking back occurs in Frost's "The Road Not Taken," a poem everybody "knows."  It's so entered our consciousness that it was the subject of a trivia question at a sports bar here where I had lunch last week.  The poem is commonly reduced to something like a high school gradutation speech: you're at a crossroads, be courageous and choose your own path, etc.  But surely Frost wasn't as banal as that.  He says explicitly in lines 9 and 10 that "the passing there / Had worn them [the paths] really about the same."  So the speaker hasn't really made such a bold choice.  But the key is the last stanza:

               I shall be telling this with a sigh
               Somewhere ages and ages hence:
               Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
               I took the one less regarded by,
               And that has made all the difference.

It's a portrait of a self-dramatizing speaker: he tells his narrative with a melodramatic sigh.  Ages and ages hence?  We don't get ages and ages.  And then his dramatic pause after the first "I" and its repetition.  The reader can sense the self-pity in the catch in his voice.  And what is this important "difference"?  We know from such Frost poems as "Neither Out Far nor In Deep" and "For Once, Then, Something" what Frost thinks about human powers of discernment, and it's not flattering. 

So I hope to avoid regrets, self-dramatization, tremolos (Piaf's word), and sighs in the blog while guarding the decades of great memories.