regret and mediocrity

decisions are difficult to make because once you've chosen one option you've automatically rejected at least one other. and what if that other was the "correct" one? how can you know? so you vacillate back and forth and finally settle on something. not because you want to but because you have to.

if you're lucky, you're one of the few individuals with faith in their ability to make the right decision. with the type of personality that doesn't look back and wonder "what if" after the fact. what if you had gone with the other option? would that one have been better? would you not feel that sense of regret?

when i was younger and slightly more optimistic i vowed to make every life decision with the idea that i would never have any regrets. whatever i chose to do, i would chose based upon my innate ability to decipher right from wrong. as if my life were laid out before me in black and white- a single line with the occasional branching point stretched out before me. the correct branch would, of course, be obvious once i reached it and i would follow it unerringly and look back in my old age to a life correctly lived. my own yellow brick road leading me toward fulfillment and away from regret.

now that i'm a bit more mature and less of the idealistic stranger to myself that i was a few years back, i recognize that there is never a correct path. that no matter what decisions you make in your lifetime, you will automatically have to exclude some options that may have been, in a sense, right for you. and you will have regrets. there is no way around it.

regret almost feels like nostalgia to me. bittersweet. it's like looking back at something fondly remembered except that it never actually happened. i think the quality of regret that lends it to nostalgia is that it's very inexistence allows you to idealize what could have been and what will never be- to create a possible reality for your life that never would have existed anyway. but oh if it had! what my life could have been! to think of all of the possible lives i could have lived... nostalgia times fifty. nostalgia times one thousand. infinite nostalgia...

i know i'm not really very old, but sometimes i feel like i am. is my life winding down or just beginning? i can no longer tell. sometimes it seems to me that life is full of mediocrity and failure and that i don't want any part of it because i embody that mediocrity. that meaninglessness. at other times i feel like i will never get enough of the experiences life has to offer. at these times an overwhelming feeling of disappointment (and excitement) that i will never live long enough to experience it all weighs on me and pushes me back out of my everydayness and into the world. i feel frantic and seek change. constant change. constant stimulation. are there other unfound remedies for this restlessness? i certainly hope so.

i can live with regret because i have to. what i can't live with is mediocrity. so i'm still looking for a cure for the commonplace even though i don't really believe that one exists. does this mean that i will have to learn to accept mediocrity in my life just as i now accept regret? hmm, check back with me in five years.