I think
Franks Sinatra said it best in his song My Way.
“Regrets,
I have had a few
But
then again, too few too mention.
I
did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption.
I
planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway.
And
more, much more that this, I did it my way….”
I think
while it’s true it was my way I am not sure it was all charted. Some of those roads were a course given to me
by fate. I did the best I could. Sometimes my best wasn’t good enough. I have thought a lot about what I would
change, or who I might have been but I keep coming back to one fact. If any of it were different, I would not be
me.
So at fifty
here are my biggest regrets
1. I regret that I spent so much time
looking for a love that I never found.
That search made me so insecure and I constantly felt I must be unworthy
of being loved. It has been a hard journey to accept that I am worthy of love
and that sometimes you can give away all the love in the world and it still won’t
be returned.
2. I regret that somehow or someway I didn’t
find a place to have a better relationship with my daughter Rebecca. I gave her up for adoption when I was a
teenager. It was the right decision for both of us. While, having her was hard and not the
decision I would have made, I was always glad that she came into the world.
3. I regret that sometimes I was blinded
by my own pain and my journey that I missed that my friends and children were
going through.
4. I regret that didn’t do better
managing money and making financial decisions because life would have been so
much easier now.
5. The biggest regret I have is not
being better to me. I allowed the world to tell me I wasn’t enough and that I was
less than. It’s very hard after allowing
the message to play to find a way to erase.
Astrid Alauda said it best, “The scars you can’t see are the hardest to
heal.”
So while
they are few, I will mention them. The
grand side of life though is that I have had the great privilege to raise four
children. They all turned out with great
individuality and incredible ability to love.
So while I did a thousand things wrong but I look at them and I know
beyond any doubt I did a whole lot more right.
So for the
next fifty years… I think I will write a
book about love and leave my sadness behind.
I will be more grateful for the wonderful blessings in my life. I will appreciate time and spend it with
quality. I will be more open minded, a better listener, and I will try to spend
every day learning something new. I will
make more effort to spend quality time with the people I love and more picky
about letting people in. I will be better to my body.
Life went by in a flash. Now I feel like the
moments are ever so quickly slipping away.
My only wish is to make them slow down a bit so I have the time to tell the
stories and pass on all the things I have stored away in my head. I want them to understand
before I go where I came from and why I chose the paths less traveled by. Most of all, I will be more appreciative of all the love God filled my life with and less forlorn over the ones He didn't. In the end, its a number 50, granted a big number, but only a signal that its time to make the rest of life a much better path than the first part. I have learned that only I have the power to make it better. So I will try to make wiser decisions and do a better job.
