The Unexamined Life? Or 'Je ne regrette rien?'

New Year's Resolutions always contain "Regret, with a dash of bitters," in a surprisingly non-shallow NYT article on how we look back on our lives.

Which we all do to some extent this time of year.

I've been reading a lot of biographies recently, including two about Joseph Stalin by Simon Montefiore, about people who were very talented but apparently allowed their resentments to overcome other countervailing tendencies---the result was disaster both for themselves and for others who happened to get in their way or just were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

However, most of us do not fall into that trap, but into a less self-destructive, but what an NYT writer calls a "corrosive" syndrome. Thus about morning-after self-examination of a life where "the saddest words of tongue or pen are only these, what might have been:"

Ghosts roam around down there, after all, and they are the worst kind — alternate versions of oneself. The one who did not quit graduate school, for instance. The one who made the marriage work. Or stuck with singing, playwriting or painting and made a career of it.

Lost possible selves, some psychologists call them. Others are more blunt: the person you could have been.

Over the past decade and a half, psychologists have studied how regrets — large and small, recent and distant — affect people’s mental well-being. They have shown, convincingly though not surprisingly, that ruminating on paths not taken is an emotionally corrosive exercise. The common wisdom about regret — that what hurts the most is not what you did but what you didn’t do — also appears to be true, at least in the long run.

When I hit sixty-five last year, I sort of fell into this rear-view window mode.
My life had had some good luck---a strong family background---and some spectacular highs: The Chicago Convention in '68, where I played a weird backstage role as a Gene McCarthy national staffer by throwing stuff out the Hilton Hotel window onto the Chicago Police below, with 'disastrous consequences."

More than a decade in the Foreign Service, living in Vietnam, France, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia. Then a short stint working as John Anderson's Middle East adviser, then a marriage to a lovely supportive woman still at my side, and eventually a lovely daughter who is my favorite human being.

All career paths have their downs, but I ended up at Amoco as an entry-strategy specialist and met a lot of interesting politicos, including the [now] presidents of Israel and Azerbaijan. Then a terrible health emergency, which caused an early retirement and living on a disability insurance income.

Along the way, I got to meet & get to know a bit some great human beings, some of them famous and near-famous and others just great. I also ran across some duds, but I have more or less flushed them from memory. In retrospect, I have to concur with my mentor in these matters:

"l am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot, forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest."