Sadly, today, Jared Fogle confessed to a series of pernicious felonies, marking a truly regrettable end to what might have been a wonderful story. He got fit, got a family, gained a fortune, and lost it all, and will likely rightly go down with a millstone hung around his neck. For most of us, our lives will not end with regrets quite that dramatic. At the end of days, most people seem to regret things that kept them from greater and deeper relationships with people. They work too much, hold back their feelings, run away from people who love them, engage in activities that force them to regret, and end up spending time with the wrong people. Ironically, when people are young, most of the choices they make lead to shallow and transitory associations. I mentioned earlier this summer how volunteering with the Forest Service on Mt. Charleston is the best thing I've done to socialize in this town. For a long time, I've wondered how to meet the kind of people I want to meet in a town where people party, drink, and objectify each other but only for the moment. On the radio this morning, the DJ mentioned a recent poll about things people regret. Basically, they break down into a few categories. They are first off things that God abjures. Then, as aforementioned, most of them amount to transitory and ephemeral things that society insists will make you happy. Ultimately, some of them categorize into things that take away our freedom and opportunity. Of all the words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these- it might have been!
According to the survey, here are the results:
The top 5 for men was:
Having a tattoo done - 32%
Behaviour whilst under the influence of alcohol - 31%
Drug use - 24%
Sustaining sporting injuries - 16%
Having children too young / before I was ready - 12%
While the top 5 regrets for women were:
Sexual encounters and/or one-night stands - 28%
Not learning to drive – 25% (this sounds odd, but I know quite a few women who haven't)
Broken friendships - 23%
Having children too young / before I was ready - 18%
Having a tattoo done - 14%
God abjures certain things for a reason. Both groups regret tattoos to a great degree. Like it or not, people judge you for your tattoos. The woman with whom I hiked this weekend told me her boyfriend has some, and he suffers because of it. Although he may be a good person, what's on the outside often tells us about things on the inside, and if you choose a tattoo that sets off an alarm in someone else, it doesn't matter sometimes what else you do. God wants us to be judged for who we are, so when we change how we look, we make it more difficult for people to see our hearts and true selves. Yes, I have a beard, but it comes off in minutes if you really want to be that critical. When we do drugs in order to escape ourselves, we often discover things about ourselves that we do not like. Since Tracie died two years ago, my buddy has spent about $40K on alcohol, meaning he's wasting his substance in riotous delusions. He doesn't remember much, and the alcohol doesn't help. When he sobers up, the pain remains, meaning he needs more alcohol to escape the pain again. Meanwhile, he's lost time and opportunity to serve God, learn about God, and reach out to God's children to help them and nobody won except the purveyors of perniciousness. I notice that many people regret children when they are too young, but they don't seem to regret sex before they are ready for the consequences. There's a reason God commands chastity- He really cares how children get into the world. God asked us to love our neighbors as ourselves and so to treat one another as we really are, as parts of the human family. He gave us our bodies so we could serve him, so when we injure them, mark them, incapacitate them, or let others abuse them to slake their lusts, we in essence say we do not appreciate the gift.
Ironically, most of these regrets are things that common parlance equates with living life to its fullest. The world would have us believe that living it up means doing whatever whenever for whatever reason we imagine. Eat, drink, and be merry! If it feels good, do it! Yet, people seem to regret engaging in things at times or in ways that God forbade. Drinking, partying, espirit de corps via tattoos, and rushing into things are endorsed by the world in order to be cool. Truly, if you don't you get left out, laughed at, and censored from their lives. I know so many women who think I'm boring and useless because I won't entertain them and spend all my substance trying to garner their attention. Especially in a town where being a 9 out of 10 in the looks department makes you average, they should be the ones trying to capture my eye, but I digress. All of these regrets are selfish things. All of them are about US. All of them are things of one moment and no moment at all. We are too proud and too selfish and too impatient to trust God, and so we have our reward. We got tattoos, drank, slept with tons of other people, went after fame, ignored our true friends, and so we have what really matters to us.
Particularly in America, I find this list interesting. Many of these regrets are things that limit our freedom and opportunity. Although advocates of certain activities claim that drugs, parties, and intercourse are about liberation, they often lead to bondage and limitations. Some people cannot get good jobs because of tattoos or because of prior drug use. Some people need a certain pay in a job because they had too many kids or because they had kids with the wrong person. Some people can't keep friends, jobs, a residence, or their own wits because they did too much of this. When I discovered yesterday that Robin Williams contracted herpes, I wondered if that contributed to his mental depression. I know that his escapades filled his life with lots of empty yesterdays during which he did neither what he ought nor what he truly enjoyed. Winter indeed must be cold for those with no or few warm memories. If you can't remember your past or don't choose to because of the pain, what do you do as you get older and remember? You regret, and it's more pain than before. Empty relationships, broken friendships, busted bank accounts, chemical dependencies, none of these free us. Some of them hurt us. When someone years ago who jilted me suddenly turned to me for help, I told her that it struck me as odd that she demanded something from me that she would never offer if our positions reversed, and she withdrew her request. She did not however withdraw from friendship, and I hear from her periodically. Far too many people continually choose bondage and captivity of Egypt for her comforts, her affirmations, and the tranquility of her servitude rather than risk the animating contest of freedom. They prefer the so-called "sure thing" and pick wealth, looks, and membership in the GOBNet, and they have their reward. Not surprisingly, many of them regret it now, and more probably will when they grow closer to death.
As difficult as I find it to live my life, I live a life largely without regret or reason to feel guilty. I am unashamed of my past and unafraid for my future. Like you, I made mistakes, but you need not suspect me of anything untoward like you can of Jared Fogle. Mostly the things I would change are decisions I made based on inaccurate or incomplete sets of information. Since then, I came to content myself with simplicity, and I satiate myself at night knowing that I'm true to who I really am. Like Picard says in the Star Trek TNG pilot, if we're going to be damned anyway, we might as well be damned for being who we really are. When I look back, I pursued relationships with every woman I felt might make a good help meet, dear wife, and life mate. I nurtured friendships with people as best as distance, time, and communication lines made possible. I stuck with my family and was blessed to belong to a family worthy of familial piety. I loved, I forgave, and I waited, and sometimes I still wait hoping that those I love will repair the breaches between us. I know that others have regretted leaving me. I recently realized that one former girlfriend actually tried to return, but I didn't notice because it was a feeble effort to heal the large scars she left when she burned me for being too fat, too old, too bearded and too divorced to be worthy of her.
Look at these regrets, and you'll see that people did things that hurt their ability to stay true to themselves and to make their own fortunes. You can't really legitimately regret choices made by others, but these kinds of choices mentioned above in the survey results limit other options and rob us of precious moments. Neal A Maxwell once said that moments are the molecules that make up eternity. In a moment, we sell our substance sometimes for a mess of pottage. We do this to fit in, to be cool, to have company rather than be alone, to conform, to compete, to comply, and to gain status. Too many spend their lives pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to be true to themselves. I know people who had kids or married for tax purposes or to fit into the social paradigm. Most people I know who do drugs or drink do so for company or to gain favor with "friends". Most people I know with tattoos did so for camaraderie or for remembrance of friends and things long gone or to rebel against their parents. Most young people compete in sports for money or fame or for pleasurable company acquired thereby. When you lose desire or ability to keep up with these things, you sometimes find that all of your friends vanish quickly and irrevocably. If they can walk away, then maybe they weren't really your friends at the beginning. I regret that I sometimes was a poor friend, and I regret those who were poor friends to me. That's the beauty of Christ's Atonement- repentance helps us restore what we regret into things about which we can rejoice. In our return to love, to faith, to fidelity, to obedience, and to righteousness, Christ swallows our regrets and replaces them with rejoicing and rejuvenation and rebirth. I hope you will return, to Him, to me, to those you love and repair things. The life you save may be your own. The love you save may be your own. Love is the only thing you really take with you. Your heart knows the truth, so trust it because life is short.
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