Choose and Go: No regrets

​I've come to believe regrets are often theories we use to beat ourselves up.

Ellen J Langer says, "when we are displeased with our choice, we mindlessly assume the unchosen alternative would have been better, and then we suffer whenever we think about what we may have missed."

It's true.

I've spent many hours suffering as if I know how things would have gone had I made different choices. I've let the momentary feeling that I've landed in the wrong place lure me into believing I walked away from some right place.

What actually is at the root of that suffering? I'm in the wrong place? Or - the only reason this feels like the wrong place is because I'm allowing myself to believe I chose this place over a place I now theorize would have been the right place?

Here's what I know. No one is ever going to give me the right or wrong answer sheet. I will never get to know where life would have gone with an alternative choice. I only get to know the choices I have made.

Those are my facts, that is my only answer sheet; I am living in my choices.

To label those choices the bad or wrong choices because of stories I dream up about alternative choices I could have made are judgments built on imagination, not reality.

If you feel like you're in the wrong place, chances are the answer isn't in the choice behind you, it's in one in front of you. Chances are the answer isn't in a choice you already made, it's in one you need to make.

But as a word of caution, just know, whatever that next choice is, you'll never get to know how life would have gone if you'd went a different direction. You'll be able to pretend you know, but you never truly will.

That's why these days I lean into the motto: choose and go.

Make a choice and live with the reality of that choice, not with imaginations of how the other choice might have gone.

Regrets are often a product of our imagination.

Quit imagining.

Choose and go.