How do I live with a decision I regret?

I argued that repentance is not a virtue and does not arise from reason. The person who repents of what they have done is twice wretched: once because they acted badly, and again because they are now tormented by it. The second misery adds nothing to the first except more pain.nnThis may sound cold. It is meant to free you. Everything that happens, including what you did, follows from causes. At the moment you made that decision, you were acting from what you knew, what you feared, what you desired, what your circumstances pressed on you. Given all that, you could not have done otherwise. To torment yourself for not having done otherwise is to imagine a freedom you never had.nnThis does not mean the decision was good. It means that blame is the wrong response. The right response is understanding. Look at the causes calmly, as you would study a storm or a disease. What did you not know? What passion was driving you? What would have had to be different for you to choose differently?nnWhen you understand those causes clearly, two things happen. The sadness loses much of its grip, because a passion we understand clearly ceases to be a passion. And you become more able to act differently next time, because you now know what moved you. That, not self-punishment, is the only real use of the past.

I had everything a Roman could want: wealth, honour, a good marriage, two sons made consuls on the same day. Then, accused of treason, I lost it all and was put in prison to await execution. There I wrote a book, in which Philosophy comes to me in my cell and teaches me how to bear it.nnOne of the first things she does is let Fortune speak for herself. I turn a wheel, Fortune says. Climb on if you like, but do not complain when the turning brings you down. That is the game. Did you think my gifts were yours to keep?nnMuch regret is a quarrel with Fortune. We think: if only I had chosen otherwise, I would still have that job, that person, that house. But those things were always on the wheel. They could have been taken by a hundred other means. You may have pulled a lever, but the wheel was always turning.nnPhilosophy's deeper lesson was this. The things Fortune gives and takes, money, position, reputation, even health, were never truly yours. What is truly yours is your mind, your capacity to understand and to love what is good. No decision and no Fortune can take that from you, unless you hand it over to despair.nnSo grieve what you lost, but do not confuse it with yourself. Turn your attention to what remains, and to what can still be done with it. That is where consolation begins.

I once imagined a demon creeping after you into your loneliest loneliness and saying: this life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more, every pain and every joy, every mistake, in the same order. Would you throw yourself down and curse the demon? Or have you known a moment when you would answer: you are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine?nnThe question is not whether this is literally true. The question is what kind of relationship you have with your own life, including the parts you regret. My formula for greatness in a human being is love of fate: wanting nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bearing what is necessary, still less concealing it, but loving it.nnThat sounds impossible when you are in the grip of regret. But consider: the decision you regret is part of what made you who you are now. The person who learned from it, the strength you found afterwards, the things you now see that you could not see before, all of that came through the mistake, not around it. To wish it away is to wish away part of yourself.nnSo do not ask how to forget it. Ask how you might become someone who could say yes to it, as part of the whole. Make something from it. Then, perhaps, one day you will want even this again.