Regrets & How To Fix Them

Lucky old Edith Piaf had none but, like Sinatra, I reckon when we reach our sixties we all have at least a few, regrets that is. Relax, my Irishness won’t allow me to use this time together to roll out the few I have – too few to mention? – even though it might be a lot less expensive than a therapist (something else being Irish sees as totally alien).

What I really wanted to chew the fat about was the notion of regret when you retire and have to reinvent yourself once again. I say once again because in reality we do that a few times over a lifetime, from child to adult, to partner, to parent, but each of those reinventions are gradual over time and influenced by role models and society’s requirements. Post-retirement, or ‘rewirement’ as Helen terms it in her blog, requires us to carryout this transformation in a relatively short space of time – sometimes over a single year or if you’re lucky maybe two – and if we’re honest only influenced by the expectations of our grownup children and some vague notion of not wanting to turn into our parents in their ‘twilight years’.

This time our transformation has to be more deliberate because there really isn’t much of a blueprint for living in your third age. By then everybody’s circumstances are largely different, based on the form the other transformations took and where you find yourself, mentally, physically, and financially, at the point when you retire.

Also, this time you have most of the life journey covered and as Nanci Griffith put it in Southbound Train – ‘Towns and cities flutter past like the pages of my life’. That means consciously or subconsciously reviewing all of your previous life decisions in order to inform the decisions you’re making in your Third Age Plan. And so to regrets.

It’s natural to think back on regrets at this stage in life, especially when we’re evaluating their impact on where we find ourselves now. After all we’ve been told so many times that nobody on their deathbed regrets not spending more time ‘at the office’, but given the opportunity to have a third age and to deal with regret at the cusp of entering that period in life, maybe it’s at this point in life that we put the notion of regret to bed once and for all.

I’m not suggesting doing that would, or maybe even should, be easy, but as the prayer goes, maybe what we need to work on is the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed and to focus only on those things that can.

How did you handle regret when you retired? Or how do you handle regret at whatever stage in life you find yourself?

*Originally published on autumnleaves.ie