The Unseen and Divine Dimension to Life’s Regrets

We live with regret all the time. It is an amoebic experience that reaches out to touch every corner of life. Many regrets – like that packet of snacks you buy on a whim, only to come home and find a dozen other packets of the same thing in your larder – concern the things banal and are easily forgotten. Others, however, can touch the core of who we are as persons – the job you left for another that very quickly did not work out, relocations that removed you from support networks and left you isolated and relationships that turn out to be highly unbalanced or codependent.

Consciously or otherwise, what often happens when we make these choices is that we build a world around the objects of these choices with our thoughts, our words and our actions – yes we even do that with our snacks. It is a possible world and life and a world not yet fully actualised or a life not fully lived out. The experience of regret, therefore, is the shattering of these possible worlds when these choices come to nothing. We may compulsively try to reenact these possible worlds so that we could somehow magically preempt and even avoid the breakdown of these worlds. However, what more probably happens is that…

Read the full article at The Catholic Weekly.