“I Do Not Regret this Journey”: Hope for the Future and Even the Past

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.”

Jelaluddin Rumi

Words attributed to the Sufi mystic Rumi; words familiar to many Unitarians, or at least some of these words. We sing a version of the words in the “Singing meditations” I lead. Interestingly the familiar version is edited. We tend to sing “Come, come, whoever you are, wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. Ours is no caravan of despair. Come, yet again, come.

The words “It doesn’t matter, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.” Seem to have been edited out. A large part of me feels frustrated at this editing. While I love the joyful welcome it is kind of dishonest. The truth is who amongst us has not fallen short of what they had hoped to be, who hasn’t broken their vows so many times? Who does not live with regret for the things they have done in life, or failed to have done in life? I know I do. I live with regret every day of my life

So I say to you come again, come again, come again, no matter how many times you have broken your vow. You will not be alone, we all have regret. We all live with regret. I know I do.

And the key of course is to live with it, to LIVE with regret, to come again and again and again, exactly as you are, warts and all and beauty spots too…

I find it interesting that one of the most popular songs played at funerals is “My Way” by Frank Sinatra and that famous line “Regrets I’ve had a few, but then again too few to mention” Other popular ones are Edith Piath “je ne regrette rien” no regret. A more modern version would be Robbie Williams’ “No Regrets”

Is this really true though? Can any of us truly say that as our lives end that we have no regrets? I’m not sure I can. I cannot make the claim that I have no regrets about my life.

Now the thought of “No regrets” brings to mind a heroic tale I remember being told of as a child. It’s about one of those classic adventurer stories of heroic failure and sacrifice.

During the last days of March, 1912, Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott (an adventurers if ever there was one) and his two surviving companions sat freezing to death in their shelter, food and fuel running out and with no hope of rescue. A team of five had set out in the hope of being the first people to set foot on the South Pole. Sadly when they arrived at the pole two months earlier, they discovered that a Norwegian team had beaten them by a month. As they headed back, disappointed, they lost two members of the team. Scott and the other two survivors managed to shelter themselves, but knew that that there was no hope for survival. Month’s later a search party found them and with them Scott’s diary. One of the final entries ponders the meaning of the experience he shared with his doomed companions. In it he states “…I do not regret this journey…” and continues… “We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last.”

In many ways it is a classic hero’s journey, except one in which the hero did not return with treasure to share. Unless you take his writings as the hero returning, perhaps they are. For in so many ways they have become the legend long after Scott’s and his team’s death., particularly those six simple words "I do not regret this journey".

Now I’m no Captain Scott, I’m no adventurer and I do live with regret. That said like Scott I do not regret the journey that has been my life. There have been many failures and mistakes along the way, but looking back I do not regret the journey itself. Would I like to repeat it though? Gosh no. Do I want to shut the door on it? No,not at all. I, like the great poet Robert Frost, live with not only hope for the future but also the past; for the more faithfully I live, the less guilt and shame I feel about the past. I keep on coming again and again despite falling short of my ideals, despite breaking my vows once again. I know I’m in good company here. Yes I live with regret, “Live” being the operative word. In many ways it is my regret that points me to try to live a better way and to create a legacy for others. I have faith in the capacity to make good from what has gone wrong before. I move forward in Hope both for the future and the past.

This brings to my mind the wonderful poem "Thanks, Robert Frost" by David Ray

"Thanks, Robert Frost"

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.

From "Music of Time: Selected and New Poems", 2006

Regret is an interesting word, it is in itself a lament, from the Old French word ‘regreter”, meaning “one who bewails the dead,” which comes from a Germanic root meaning “to greet.” As Mark Nepo has said of regret “We always face these two phases of regret: to bewail what is dead and gone, and, if we can move through that grief, to greet the chance to do things differently as we move on.”

As we move on with not only hope for the future, but also hope for the past. The key is to truly “Live” with regret, to make something better from it.

Nepo notes something of real value here, it is a lesson from grief. Yes regret is a lament for what has gone, what has died, but if we greet it fully with love we can learn from the past and do things differently in the future. The response to regret is both of life and death. The choice is ours. By the way this is the one choice we have in life. We do not choose what happens to us but we can choose how we respond to what happens to us. This is the one ultimate freedom, that is open to all of us.

To quote Viktor Frankl:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

So the response to regret is ours. We can either choose life or death. We can close in and shut down or we can create with love.

There are two interesting examples of responses to regret in the New Testament accounts. They are found within the Easter story, following Jesus’s betrayal. Luke’s (Ch22 vv 60-62) Gospel depicts Peter regretting his betrayal of Jesus. He wept bitterly for his fear based denial and yet how did he respond. Well it was on Peter that the early Christian Church was built, Peter was the "Rock". For Peter Hope was once again born. Matthew (Ch 27 vv 3-5) depicts a very different response to regret that of Judas Iscariot. Who over powered with guilt and regret for his betrayal, tried to return the 30 pieces of silver and took his own life. How many people follow this path, are utterly broken with guilt and regret and take their own lives. There is a suicide epidemic in this country if only we could find a way to let people know that thy are welcome to come again and again no matter how many times they have broken their vows. It is never too late, but sadly sometimes it is.

Regret has its place, it does no good denying this. The key is how respond to it. We need to feel it and to respond in life giving and affirming ways. We need to live with both hope for the future but for the past as well. The key is to create new life from regret. For as Joan Chittister wrote in “The Gift of Years”

“The burden of regret is that, unless we come to understand the value of the choices we made in the past, we may fail to see the gifts they have brought us.

The blessing of regret is clear — it brings us, if we are willing to face it head on, to the point of being present to this new time of life in an entirely new way. It urges us on to continue becoming.”

To live without hope is to fail to live at all. To live with only regret is to die before our bodies die. I’m sure that Captain Scott must have wondered about the mistakes he had made even in those desperate final days, he must have wondered how different things might have been if other decisions had been made. That said he faced death with those immortal words “I do not regret this journey”. There is something powerfully life enhancing in this and a legacy that has lived on beyond his life. I suspect that the lesson here is that we should never regret the journey even if we do not reach the heights we aim for.

It’s not regret in and of itself that is the issue but what we do with our regrets. Yes regrets can eat away at our souls, but it we are wise, regrets can be powerful teachers too. To learn from them we just need enough humility and hope for both the future and the past, rather than allow them to gnaw away at our souls. Hope is the key. It is hope that will allow us to learn from our regrets and thus create a better future. Hope is born from humility. Just because life humbled us it does not mean that we cannot once again live in hope that we can create something better.

Do not regret the journey, I live with hope both for the future and the past. Let’s face and truly know those things we regret, no matter how many times we have broken our vows. We need not be paralysed, lamenting the past, nor do we need to close the door on it. Let us instead move through the grief of regret and greet the future with its possibility of what might yet be.