Whenever I hear someone say “I have no regrets,” my eyebrows twitch and itch to be raised. The two look at each other, wag their tails and do a little swim routine. My nose flares up and it wants to join the whole circus but my mouth pulls the sides back down. “Oh mouth, you ringmaster, you! Some bilateral breathing here please!”

Let me elaborate. We regret a lot of things. No? Okay I’ll go first. I regret not continuing with the piano. I regret not studying hard in school.I regret not spending as much time with my hilarious father and for wasting so many years running away from home rather than being in it with my lovely mother. I regret trusting the people I trusted and for breaking the trust of people who trusted me. A lot of my regrets revolve around the years I spent being inebriated.I regret the first drop of alcohol. I regret making a fool out of myself countless times. I regret losing who I was when I was struggling with my own addictions. I regret… a lot of things. There were times when I would toss and turn, beat myself up for doing something completely against who I was, or who I thought I was. When people asked me about my life, I’d say “I have no regrets” just to make myself feel better about my past.

I have a strong feeling most do the same. Live each day like it’s the last, Carpe Diem, Live to the fullest- I feel is the world’s way of hiding this fear of regret, of running away from consequences for their actions, of just being ignorant because well, ignorance is truly bliss. I wish I hadn’t heard about babies being killed, horrific stories of people being tortured, and children being sacrificed or neglected. My eyes were opened to this and so my world becomes a little sadder. My world becomes a perfectly imperfect and blue world. But this world strives foolishly for perfection. Something no one can achieve; And so to make ourselves feel better, we hear a lot of, ‘nobody’s perfect’.

It is only when you come to a point where you are dead sure that someone else has control over your life and that this someone is way more powerful than this world or universe that you truly mean your “I have no regrets.”

Faith is a powerful thing. It’s real. More real than this world , which in essence is a passing illusion. Faith is grace. Faith is mercy. Living in an illusion which is real one second and a memory the next is quite hopeless and futile. I’d want to cut my time here short. But I have this faith, more real than what I can see or touch. This faith is one that burns and rejuvenates the soul in me. Not because of some effect on the brain that undoubtedly a wise man would call ‘chemical reactions that alter our reality’ but a faith from something other than me. I could never have created something so powerful in myself. No one can. So the wise man is wrong. No person’s brain is complex enough to understand and explain the unfathomable. We have limited resources and we are not capable so I don’t even know why we try.

So now, in a veiled manner, I can honestly say that I have no regrets… *breathe* I have no regrets because I am not in ULTIMATE control…*breathe* I have no regrets because I am not in ULTIMATE control AND I AM LOVED.

It’s not a circus after all.