We all have people who help shape our lives. Teachers, guides, coaches, mentors. They have specific roles. Then there are the people that I refer to as my ‘everyday angels’. Some of these are friends; some fall into one or other of those teacher / guide / coach / mentor categories; but there are also others whose role is a bit more nebulous. They are the ones who simply show up when I need them to and say the right thing.
Maybe they know what they are doing – or maybe they’re just doing what they know and hoping it will help. These are the people who nudge my direction when I’m uncertain or catch me when I’m slipping.
One of my everyday angels is Sigi Osagie*. I came across Sigi in my former life in the world of procurement. That’s where I first heard the name and because I was in that world, trying to achieve something that only some of us in the organisation understood, I read his books, took his advice, tried to make it work. I made one of those on-line connections that doesn’t actually mean anything, until somehow, suddenly it does. He is a generous man. All my angels are generous. I think it goes with the job description.
The bizarre thing is that it started to mean something later, in my new life, which has nothing to do with the world of business or procurement. Sigi continues to nudge and catch me even though I left that world years ago, even though we do not know each other. Not on this plane, anyway.
Every so often he is kind enough to promote one of my poetry posts on his social media, convincing me that maybe I do occasionally manage to write something worthwhile, and giving my work a little boost in the process. Thank you, Sir! More often, he posts more general things that simply align with my new life – despite where he’s actually coming from a lot of the time. You wouldn’t think that procurement and poetry have much in common, but maybe there is a certain need for imagination and creativity and bravery that thread through both.
That’s a long intro. It’s really just the backstory as to why I’m starting today’s actual musings on the back of an @SigiOsagie post in which he quotes Robin Sharma saying, “One of the saddest things in life is to get to the end and look back in regret, knowing that you could have had, been and done so much more.” He then simply asks, “What will you look back on?”
It is such a powerful question. It goes to the heart of what we have done so far, and what we have not done that we once thought we might. It goes to the heart of what stage of life we are at now, and how much time there is likely to be left to us in order to do either those things, or the things we may have replaced them with now we are older. It goes to the heart of whether we’re living the life we want to live and being the person we want to be, or just going through the motions of a script that someone else has written for us.
As we get older these questions become more and more important. We need to answer them if we do not want to reach that saddest of all days when we say “I wish I had…” or “If I had my time over I would…” knowing that there is no time left and no repeat performance.
The real heart of the question, though, has little to with whether we have lived or are living the life we wanted. It is much more to do with how we feel about it. When we look back at what we have done and not done, when we look now at what we are doing and not doing, how do we feel about those things?
Regret is not firmly attached to any specific non-achievement or mistake. Regret is simply the colour we choose to paint those things in.
The fact is that when we reach the end, it will be true of each and every one of us that we could have had, been and done so much more. That is not sad; it is simply a function of the chaos of existence. AND its opposite is equally true. When we reach the end, it will also be true of each and every one of us that we could have had, been and done so much less. We get to choose whether to cloak our life in regretting the former, or to revel in the grateful light of the latter. We can look at what we did achieve, what we survived, what we helped create - or we can look at what we did not. It will be a choice at the end of the days.
One important thing is to understand that the past cannot be undone, but that does not mean it is done and finished. The past exists, always. It is there to teach us, to support us, to warn us. It continues to echo and whisper – we simply need to choose whether or not to listen to what it is saying and, if we choose to listen, to decide what to do with what we hear.
The more important thing is that the present is where we can make our future-past one that we will be happier with. The present is where we create the past we will have to live with in the future.
If we’re not happy with the past we currently have, I reckon there are two things to be done.
Firstly, get out the paint pots and find a different colour to paint it. Don’t whitewash it but find a subtle shade of forgiveness for the mistakes we made and another equally subtle one for those that treated us ill. Or redact them entirely if that works. There’s a line between absolute denial and just choosing not to think about something or someone. We can acknowledge the reality of certain events in the past, and then just decide to put our focus elsewhere: on the good stuff.
Then, take a quick TARDIS trip to see where the life we are living now is leading us, and how happy we are about that. Work out the bits we might (in future) wish were different now. And make the changes. Do the difference. Become now, the person we will want to have been.
So. Expounding on the theory of it is all very well, but maybe I should actually answer Sigi’s
question since he was kind enough to put it out there on a week when I was thinking I had no starting point for putting the pen to the page.
Unless I do something inconceivable in the meantime, I will look back without regret. I have none now. I have been no angel, not blameless, not perfect. My emotions are not always managed as well as they might be, and I have hurt people along the way. I have also been hurt. Abused. Misused.
But at the same time, I know how blessed my life has been thus far.
The way I see it, everything up to this point has led up to this point. And now I am the person I want to be, I am doing what I want to do, I have all that I want & need. Still imperfect, still scope for more, but also its counterbalancing scope for less. Still having only my own imperfect ability in the chaos of the world at large to influence the direction of change. I am still a work-in-progress.
Random things I will look back on:
- A happy childhood, where we were loved, well-housed, well-fed, well-schooled, allowed to play outside with minimal / no parental supervision. Tree-climbing. River-wading. Grass camps. Bike rides. Ball games.
- Overnight car journeys. Sleeping to the sound of an engine. The glow of motorway lights. The winter trip when there was nothing on the M62 and moonlight and snow on the hills.
- An extended family that lived miles away but were still an integral part of our growing up.
- Holidays – caravan sites, camping trips, school trips – castles and beaches and hills and woods and rivers and reading by lamplight – the smell of wet canvas and whiskey-laced coffee
- Learning to swim, to read, to ride a bike. Later, learning to travel alone.
- One or two specific arguments with parents, with schoolfriends, with college friends.
- The people who were part of my life, and then weren’t, now aren’t – and the reasons for that the parting of the ways.
- The people who were not part of my life and now are!
- Decisions I made, relationships I had, that were ill-advised and ended badly, but which I do not regret for a single second because of how what happened shaped who I am and what I believe about people, about myself, about love, about life. And also because I am grateful for what they gave me before it ended badly.
- A career that I never intended to have, but one in which I hope I made a difference, where I hope the work we did ultimately mattered and changed a life or two.
- Various periods of study, why I chose to devote myself to them, how hard it was and how I felt at the end of it.
- I will remember the people I worked with: those I still respect and those I never did.
- The travels to all those far-away places, the walking, the laughter, the people we met along the way.
- Most of all, I suspect, I will remember the shift. From quitting my job, through temporary freelancing, losing a partner, creating my new home, retiring, designing a new life, making new friends, and most importantly finding my new tribe among writers…and coming home to my place on the page. I will remember Clive telling me "you’ll be alright, you have your friends" not knowing that what he meant was that "you will have your friends and you have no idea how many or who they will be."
- I will look back on all the changes in each phase of my life and how they informed the next one.
- Learning to travel differently, when being became more important than doing. Learning how to return to places rather than rushing on to the next one.
- I will look back on learning to write, and write differently, and write better.
- I will look back on learning to be brave enough to share it and to trust that maybe some of it will find a mind or heart or soul that it can touch.
And maybe in the next few years I will find more delights and joys to look back on with insights gained and joys experienced. I trust that that is more than a ‘maybe’.
For good or ill, I won’t regret. For good or ill, I know I continue to live up to Mam’s mantra that you can only do your best. In both senses of the expression. I continue to do my best and to accept that it was my best if it turns out not to be good enough. By someone else’s definition that is. I trust that I will look back on my life, on my own terms, and be able to say that, yeah, I did OK.
Check out Sigi at Sigi Osagie – Writer, Speaker, Business Adviser & Coach + Mentor or on Twitter @SigiOsagie
