Late night thoughts -- regret

Experience is so inadequate to our ending. We talk about living a life of no regrets, but I think to myself that the person who dies without regret is one who must be lacking all imagination. I consider the paths I have chosen in my own life, and I am for the most part happy with the track of it to this point in time. But without regret? There were a thousand lives I could have lived, and a thousand more I could start living from this moment.

Here and now, enmeshed in my present life, the feeling must be so muted in comparison to the last distilled instant of consciousness. But even now, enmeshed in my present life, there are many, often incompatible, routes I wish I could have pursued. And I would have wanted to pursue all of them, were that scenario at even the vaguest, most distant horizon of the possible.

If I were to finish the books that are half done in manuscript, and the fragments of a novel my father left, and novels friends and family members have periodically said they wish I would write for them, there would still be another novel, shelves of novels unwritten, novels impossible to write were I to want only that for the remainder of my time.

Without regret. I suspect that regret is the closest thing we have to counterbalance our delusions of immortality. I do not mean "immortality" on a grand scale -- "I am a god" or somesuch nonsense -- but rather in the sense that we all fill our days with many trite and silly things. The way we waste time, doing things that are unimportant to us. Those actions are the living flesh of deluded immortality -- the actuality, perhaps even the necessity of our assumption that we will take care of the important things at another time, on another day.

Or perhaps, in that last droplet of consciousness, our perception changes radically enough to erase all regret. I do not know which ending would be worse, or if the answer is the same for every person, or if there is anything one can do to ward it away or invite it -- depending on what one might wish for. Regret or no regret.