The worst mistakes I ever made

And how I learned from them

I have said and done so many stupid things in my life that it’s truly impossible to keep track of them all. Maybe you’re the same. My memories of these incidents stay hidden in the back of my mind, until I’m trying to work, or maybe sleep, and then they come bouncing back into my consciousness like microwave popcorn, regrets both consequential and not: POP: the time I didn’t go to MTV’s Nirvana Unplugged taping because I thought I’d see them some other time; POP, the time I dumped one of my closest friends instead of trying to work things out; POP that idiotic thing I said in a meeting once, years ago; POP, that one tattoo I never should have gotten; POP that time I married the wrong person.

I can be having a perfectly good day, and out of nowhere something dumb or regrettable or unkind I said or did will come hurtling back to me, with such force that it feels like the event just happened moments ago, instead of years. I’d say that not a day goes by without me feeling regret of some manner or another, often because of something in the deep past.

Some people like to say that regret is a wasted emotion, but I don’t agree with that. Regret can actually be a force, propulsing you to do better. In the movie Magnolia, Jason Robards’s character, on his deathbed, delivers a monologue to his night nurse, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. He tells the story of how atrociously he treated his first wife, and how horribly she suffered because of him, and then says this: