Is it possible to feel both remorse and gratitude for our choices in life?

​It was a quiet Friday night. I found myself scrolling through Roku looking for something mindless and meaningless to watch.

Not coincidentally, I suppose, I landed on something just the opposite.

Over the years I'd heard a lot about the movie Wild. It was released in 2014 and is based on the memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail by Cheryl Strayed.

A basic introduction to the plot from Wikipedia:

In June 1995, despite a lack of hiking experience, Cheryl Strayed leaves Minneapolis to hike, by herself, 1,100 miles Pacific Crest Trail. During the journey, she reflects on her childhood and memories of her mother, Bobbi, whose death from cancer sent Cheryl into a deep depression that she tried to numb with heroin and anonymous sex. After her behavior destroyed her marriage and then led to an unwanted pregnancy, Cheryl had an abortion and resolved to hike the trail to try to rediscover the woman her mother raised her to be.

There's a scene several hundred miles into the hike, many days into wrestling with her demons, when Strayed wonders, "What if I forgave myself? What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have?"

It was a powerful question. It hit home. Especially when she went on to wonder, if I'm truly sorry for those things, is it still ok to accept I wouldn't be who I am without those things?

Just last week I was there. Right there. That exact same spot. Not on the trail, but in that wrestling.

I told someone I'd come to be deeply sorry for some choices I've made in my life. But then I had to acknowledge, I'm not sure I would have ever become a person who is deeply sorry for anything without having made those very choices.

It is in choices I wish I'd never made where I found the place of becoming someone I think inside I'd always wished I could become.

At the time if felt sort of like an apology with an asterisk. Even as much as I knew that asterisk was a part of the most sincere apology I could offer.

Maybe ever had offered.

Then I watched Reese Witherspoon, who was fantastic as Cheryl by the way, wrestling with the exact same thing. I felt her emotions. I recognized that pain on her face and those tears in her eyes. It made me instantly feel way more human than asterisk.

It was comforting to know that what felt like an isolated and unique complexity in my life is maybe a common part of many lives. Are we all wrestling with regrets for having hurt people along maybe the only path that would have ever taken us to feeling sorry for that hurting?

Most of us are taught right and wrong. Most of us learn the list of things we should feel remorse about. Most of us are taught the words I'm sorry at a young age.

So maybe that's not what's missing in the world to promote deeper healing and remorse and forgiveness. Forgiveness of self and of others.

Maybe what is missing is giving ourselves permission to deeply embrace the value in things we deeply wish we had never done. Or, maybe even more complicated, that we can feel deeply sorry for things that we at times also feel a deep sense of gratitude for.

It's a great turmoil, I suppose. This reality of hurting others on the way to our own healing. But is that maybe the path we are all on one way or another. Is hurting others an inevitable part of the excavation of self?

That sounds like an asterisk, I suppose. Or an excuse. But more than ever I wonder if it's a shared truth.

In the movie you come to discover Cheryl, according to the books on right and wrong, had done some pretty despicable things along the way of her life.

She hurt a lot of people.

Yet, I could only feel myself wanting to hold her and tell her, I get it.

I have been there; I am there.

And after being a part of your story, Cheryl, I think maybe we all are.