There’s no good reason for people to have regrets. Edith Piaf was right all along. It’s not just the fact that you can’t go back in time and change things anyway, and therefore there’s no point in torturing yourself. It’s also the fact that regrets are based on a wrong assumption.
We assume that, if we had made a different choice at a particular juncture, things would've been better, but we just don’t know that. We think we do, but we don’t. We cannot know.
Our life is the cumulative result of an infinite number of choices, which take place every second. Where every single one of those choices would’ve taken us is ultimately unpredictable.
For example, would I have a better-paid job now if I had gone to University? Probably. But maybe going to University would have triggered a series of events that eventually would’ve led me to die horribly in a car crash, or to take up golf as a hobby. (Both equally terrifying.)
(Or let’s imagine a different scenario. I get a degree and I get a job in some office. One of my colleagues is really hot but she’s a Born Again Christian. I start chatting her up, and after some time she makes it pretty clear that there’s no chance I’ll ever see her naked unless I embrace Jesus Christ, which of course I do in a heartbeat. Eventually we get together, and then one day I come home only to find that she has consigned all of my comics with nudity in them to the flames, because “pornography makes Jesus cry”. Oh, the horror! It doesn’t bear thinking.)
As I said, every single second of our life we are faced with a choice. I just chose to write this, but I could’ve decided to do a number of different things instead. A huge number of things. I could’ve decided to read a book, or go for a walk, or run a little experiment to see how long it would take for a sandwich to completely rot if I left it in the middle of the garden. (I do wonder.)
Every single one of these different options in turn leads to another set of options, a huge number of them, and so on, and so on. The number of ramifications is so vast that, in comparison, a game of chess looks like a game of noughts and crosses (or tic-tac-toe in American English). It’s mind-boggling.
Having said all that, I do have one tiny regret. (Did I just contradict myself? Yes I did.) It still bugs me from time to time. But before I tell you what it is, I need to take a step back.
Our son’s former piano teacher embraces what is known as the Suzuki Method, pioneered decades ago by a Japanese violin teacher by the name of Shinichi Suzuki.
Traditional music teachers are quite skeptical about the Suzuki Method. They see the whole thing as a bit of a cult. It’s not. (And if it was a cult it would be the most boring cult ever. I’ve never seen anyone taking any drugs, and I was never invited to take part in any orgy. Not that I'd want to take part in an orgy, but it would be nice to be asked, out of politeness.)
The Suzuki Method only differs from traditional methods in two aspects, really, and neither of them is in any way revolutionary, let alone esoteric.
In traditional methods, children start to read music from day one. But reading music is not easy for really young kids, and so normally children don’t start before the age of six or seven. In the Suzuki Method children start earlier, around the age of four, because they start by learning simple pieces by heart (kids are really good at learning things by heart), and only later on they start to read music.
That’s one thing. The other one is that parents and pupils are encouraged to observe the lessons of other pupils, and to take notes if they wish to do so. That’s all there is to it, in a nutshell. Hardly a cult.
When we were in the studio of the piano teacher to observe some other kid’s lesson, often there was this Chinese woman with her two boys as well.
While the woman was busy observing that kid’s lesson and taking notes, the two boys (who of course couldn’t give a rat’s ass about it) were busy drawing. And their drawings were just incredible. I still remember them.
They didn’t feature any human being or animal. They were just drawings of buildings or machinery. Very complex ones. The perspective of those buildings and machines was all wrong, but that made the drawings better, somehow. They were fairly big, and they were packed with details. I'm telling you, they were brilliant.
For months I wrestled with the idea of asking the mum if I could have those drawings, but I never did. Normally I don’t particularly care what people think of me, but asking a woman if you can take her kids’ drawings home with you might be just a bit too weird, and so I chickened out.
(That was unlike me. In 49 years I made an ass of myself more times than I can remember. Hopefully I still have many more years of embarrassment ahead of me. Fingers crossed.)
I should just forget about the whole thing, and yet sometimes I find myself thinking about those drawings. It partly frustrates me, but also it partly gives me a degree of pleasure, in a way.
And maybe that’s what we should try to see regrets as. Not as missed opportunities (they can't be, because the big picture is precluded from us), but rather as mere fantasies of what could've been, fantasies we like to indulge in every now and then. No harm in that, I suppose.
