Rebellious Thoughts of a Woman

An orchid that I received post-bloom a year ago and which, obviously, I have somehow cared for well-enough to rebloom. What a sense of accomplishment.

Apparently we are not supposed to live with regrets, as I became aware yesterday while loop listening to “No Day But Today” with its insistence that I “Forget regret—or life is yours to miss.” But how do you tell your personal documentary that events and people need to be eternally spliced? How do you stop a mind’s meanderings while driving down a straight road early on a Sunday morning? Which brings me to an important tangent: What is with songs nowadays that are barely disguised self-help lessons? I don’t want a song to tell me what to do; I just want to hear a few uplifting love stories that might bring on a memory, balanced with those that reveal the ugly churn of love into empathetic pain. Is that too much to ask for? Can songwriters keep the suggestions of their therapists to themselves and stick to harmonizing about love.

Has it always been like this? I don’t think so. I remember listening to the ache of love missing, present, and past, not this guidebook. And it’s wrong. Who wants to hear a 20-year-old spouting words of wisdom? If I wanted the words, I wouldn’t have taken a break from NPR. The same applies to older singers: I don’t want to know what you think of the world we live in; again, taking a break from that to listen to you.

Going back to that line that’s bothering me: “Forget regret—or life is yours to miss.” That is a horrible suggestion; or, perhaps, it is a horrible suggestion to a middle-aged woman who needs to find her way amidst regrets for things done and not done, ‘cause it can’t be undone. And certainly steer clear of telling me that only by making decisions and choices is life lived, because it’s happening whether or not you make choices, wise or otherwise. Let’s be honest: there will always be something to regret for there are more choices than paths to be taken. Life cannot be missed, even for the fatalist on a sailboat. Besides, this implies that we only have regrets if we don’t act, but what about regretting actions taken, which, certainly, is a treasure trove for a woman with age spots, skin tags, and a mind that recently blanked on “pool table” and “fidget”?

Regret. It seems to be my new home territory, and, definitely, an uptick from where it used to reside at self-pity. I say, regret is in the same category as envy, hard to live there, but even harder not to stop by for the occasional visit. Why regret regret? Live with it because it seems that there is no alternative to backward looking, and doesn’t it, really, help you better understand and accept where you are, regretfully or not?

Note: I’m back, I think. I’ve been busy with school, but more so I’ve been residing in my little hole where I am certain that only published authors, especially novelists, have valid things to say. But you know what, they don’t. I have worked at convincing myself that I am like a poet or songwriter (of yore, not these singing therapists) who focuses on one topic and makes it into a world and that is okay since we all need to be reading accounts from lots of worlds to inform our own mini-micro-world.