At 73 the weight of regrets I carry is akin to a persistent extra 20 pounds I must support – not knee buckling but psychically insistent or maybe a gray cloud close to the ground just within my peripheral vision and always present. The regrets are personal and professional and include missed connections, mishandled opportunities, cowardly evasions, foolish remarks, mean actions, a misreading of my own character’s strengths while I often set my weaknesses on replay.
I am being purposely vague. I sometimes repeat these regrets aloud to myself in all their grisly, mundane specificity, but I’ve never been one for confession — an Irish reticence or an inheritance from my parents, who knows.
A partial antidote for those regrets has been accepting one of the consolations of age which is to look back on divisions I had with some and understand how much of that discord was caused by my own lack of wisdom, by a willingness to listen to the poor advice of others and by the lack of a certain breadth of vision I now possess that I did not then.
I see two old adversaries now and then and feel ashamed for ever thinking of them as such. One has become a good friend. Whenever I see them, I greet them with genuine good cheer, happy they are still alive, happy to listen to how their lives are these days.
We have become old men together and that common survival often seems a good beginning, for however long it lasts.
I still lie awake some nights and think why did I do that, or not do that or how could my blindness have been so complete, my youth so self-absorbed, my conscience so ill-formed.
There is no “but” that salves anything, really. I did what I did. The cloud remains. But when I see those old men, I do awaken to a light I had not expected. That is worth something.
