I was interviewing a businessman, years ago, about his long career, then coming to a close. I asked him did he have any regrets. He smiled, a bit Mona Lisa-like, and cast his eyes down before looking back up to me.
“No regrets,” he said. “But a little remorse.”
He was a fairly elderly man and I was a young reporter. I didn’t really understand his answer at the time. Nor was he willing to elaborate, so I let it go. It stayed stuck in my head, though, for years and years, rattling around in the back of my mind, just waiting for me to know what it meant.
Now I’m a lot older I think I’m starting to get it. I think he was a lucky man if he really had no regrets. And now I can empathise with him acknowledging some remorse late in his life. I now feel that too, keenly at times.
Regret? Some define it as the feeling we have when we realise or fear that we made a decision that wasn’t actually in our own best interest. Like that property you didn’t buy back when prices were realistic and you could have done it with the money you were earning. Or the person you didn’t marry, the job you didn’t accept, the class you didn’t enrol in. The time you didn’t stand up for yourself, the way you voted in an election or your meal choice in a restaurant. Regrets can sting, that’s for sure; sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. But you can usually tell yourself that you made your decisions based on the best information you had at the time. Or maybe instead you blame somebody else’s advice or influence. Or maybe you just admit you were foolish. Whatever: you just file it away along with other regrets and life moves on for better or worse. With luck you do the mental calculus and conclude that, on balance, you made more good choices than bad. Either way, regrets are more or less on you alone.
But remorse is a different beast. Remorse is when you come face to face with the hurts you’ve caused other people because of things you did or didn’t do. Did you bully another kid at school, or join in with the popular kids picking on a loner because you weren’t brave enough to do any different? Were you mean to your siblings? Cruel to an animal? You might picture your whole life, passing through relationships, friendships and workplaces and interacting with hundreds of people in many ways. In all those interactions, chances are, you probably caused pain to others. I doubt it’s possible to live a long life without doing so, sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally, sometimes – it may be – unavoidably.
Remorse comes quietly up behind you, taps you on the shoulder and speaks to the person you are now about things the person you used to be once did, or failed to do. It can hurt to face those things when you look back and imagine how those other people felt – the people affected by your acts or omissions. And perhaps it hurts more if you realise that you did to others some of the very things that had been done to you and that had caused you pain. That’s when it seems karmic.
I hope my late father (may he rest in peace) will forgive me for sharing the fact that, close to the end, he tearfully remonstrated with himself for making some of the same mistakes his own father had made: mistakes he had sworn to himself he would not repeat. That was remorse, real and sore, and it hurt to see him acknowledge it.
When I watched the TV series My Name is Earl it gave me some good laughs. Earl is a terrible person who one day realises how terrible he’s been and sees how his actions have led him to his bad situation in life. He makes a list of all the people he’s wronged and he tries to track them all down to make amends, person by person. There are times I think I’d like to do the same. Not for everything I ever did wrong, but certainly for a few key instances.
Once, again working as a reporter, I interviewed a woman whose brother had murdered her parents. She had written a book about the power of forgiveness. That interview made a deep impression on me. I could see how much good it had done her to forgive her brother and yet I struggled to imagine how hard it must have been to actually let go of enough anger and pain to make forgiveness possible. I will say that I benefited immensely from that interview and I’m grateful for the inspiration it gave me to reconcile myself to a close relative from whom I had become estranged (there was blame on both sides). When that relative later unexpectedly died I was deeply stricken, but incredibly grateful that I’d had the chance to give and receive a meaningful apology before the opportunity was permanently lost.
Regrets can be unpleasant to contemplate, especially the big ones. But the scars of remorse lie deeper, as my old businessman friend warned me, many years ago.
