Beelibee's Blog

When people retire from work or any other regular activity, they often face the problem of loss of structure to their daily lives. This can result in general, unspecific feelings of loss and unhappiness, to feeling a lack of purpose and to difficulties with time management. All too often, the underlying thought is something like: ‘what’s the point, anyway?’.

It may indicate a certain degree of slight ‘OCD behaviour’ on my part, but I set great store by structure – it doesn’t have to be rigorous or immutable, but I genuinely believe that some measure of shape or routine to a person’s day tends to help more than hinder their mental health. Whether it takes the form of a meditation routine, a job of some kind (whether paid or unpaid), a word puzzle or a language lesson, those sorts of routine exercises convey something to the brain that says, ‘I’m not done yet – I still have x, y and z to do’, which may just about contribute a tiny element to getting through the day and feeling a small sense of achievement. There is a point.

Very few people I have met truthfully echo the words that Edith Piaf sang, ‘Je ne regrette rien’, about their own life. At least Frank Sinatra made it, ‘Regrets I have a few, but then again, too few to mention’. My preferred rendition is, ‘Regrets I have aplenty, but they’re behind me’. What’s done is done.

There is a variety of wishful thinking that illustrates what seems a common human trait: a person thinks, ‘if I can just have/do/experience this, I’ll be happy’. It may work for a while but in terms of your overall existence, it never, ever works. No life is that simple. It is also akin to the notion that is behind all regrets – ‘if I had only done this/not done that, then everything would be fine’. Except there is absolutely no reason to believe that would be the case. There is no way of knowing it would have turned out the way the person thinks when they look back with their rose-tinted glasses. The ‘if only’ thing simply does not work. Even if you have the time travel kit that gets you back there to make your different decision, your making a different decision is only part of the story. Others might make different decisions too, events may take a different turn, and the end result might be that you find yourself exactly where you are now, or at least feeling no happier.

The variety of regret that relates to having hurt someone else is something I think is worth looking at in a slightly different way, though not with a view to trying to change the past. If the person you hurt 25 years ago is still on the planet and you can reach them, apologising for having hurt them is something you can do, which may help with healing both a part of them and a part of you. If the person is no longer alive, then my approach is to visualise a conversation with them in which you apologise and where you try to feel the feelings around the event as authentically as you possibly can. It may or may not help you, but it is worth a try. There are certainly psychotherapists who recommend this as a way of managing emotions that refer back to some kinds of past pain.

So, at the risk of being boringly pragmatic, I would insist on the veracity of the old adage, ‘Change what you can, accept what you can’t change and have the wisdom to know the difference’. That may seem dry and unhelpful to the person feeling the pain of regret for parts of their past, but I have yet to encounter someone who has found it effective in practice to wish now that they had acted differently then. You did it then; it did not produce the improvement or lasting happiness you hoped for or expected; you can and should feel the feeling of regret for that, but acceptance of the feeling and then allowing it to be let go has a better chance of giving you some peace and serenity than insisting on holding on to it.

The Christmas and New Year period is a time many people use to take stock of the previous year and their lives generally. Lists of Christmas greetings and presents are a reminder of which individuals are still in our lives and which ones we choose as suitable recipients of greetings and presents. While it is not the case that friendship is a trading arrangement, it is nonetheless dependent on something mutual or reciprocal. It must involve participation by more than one side, whatever form that participation takes. One-way relationships may just about work between family members, but they are less tenable when there is a genuine choice as to whether they are to continue or not. Chain statements across social media insisting that friends can always ‘pick up where they left off’, that there is no need to keep in touch or make any effort to keep the friendship alive because friendship is somehow completely self-sustaining, have always struck me as wishful thinking by people who hope and trust that saying something is the case makes it so – that is about as charitable as it gets.

My preferred analogy is that friendship is like a bridge that is under constant construction. It needs work from both ends – otherwise it is asking a lot of the cantilevering to expect it to function as it is supposed to.

Returning to Christmas greetings and presents, the whole ritual is generally built on some measure of reciprocity. This is why it is often referred to as an exchange. If there is only ever one party doing the proffering, that does not qualify as an exchange. There are people who may choose to be exclusively givers, never expecting anything in return, but unless it is in the context of charitable giving, most of us eventually get a slight gnawing feeling suspiciously like resentment tarnishing the pleasure of one-way giving, at least when it is to people whose circumstances are not dissimilar from our own.

I have always been notoriously bad at giving up on people, and have often continued to plug away, trying to keep moribund friendships and connections alive long after the sensible decision would have been to get the message that my efforts were not reciprocated … and gently desist. A new year provides the opportunity to try to do something different.