Living life backwards to ward against enduring regret

“Late last night,
I heard my screen door slam,
And a big yellow taxi,
Took away my old man.”
— Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi (1970)

Isn’t amazing how the innocuous image of a big yellow taxi taking your husband away is buried deep in a song that has as its chorus, 

“Don’t it always seem to go,
That you don’t know what you’ve got,
Till it’s gone...”

Perhaps one of the greatest life lessons comes to us by the word, “Regret.”  And we’re all touched by it.

We all spend time and effort and money and focus on the wrong things (and people) as compared with those we’d be wiser investing in.

The tragedy is in the time that won’t come back — when it’s just too late.

BUT, I would argue this point; there is no better way of learning a lesson than learning the hard way — not to do it again.

As many pastors, businesspeople, and many others will attest, the call of our work can send us away from the very people we may lose; after a plethora of opportunities to say no, it can really be that just one more yes creates an irreversible chasm.  Those who lost their loved ones instantly or over time, and only as they look back do they see the pattern.  It’s pain!

Life lived through the lens of a loaned regret motivates us to do now what can only be done now.  So ‘later’ — a seriously bad later — never comes.  Life ought to really be the investment into such things.

It may seem miserable, but to lament what may well prove to be a future regret motivates us to do the harder work now so that life in future will not feature that sting of enduring regret.

What might our lives be saying to us now in terms of what regrets we might be sowing up for ourselves in our unwise use of time, effort, resources and focus?

You are not alone in this.  Everyone faces the same challenges.

Who in our families is missing out?  How might we shift our focus to reorient our passion and intimacy to our loved ones?

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash