Winter 2006 - News in Psychic Counseling

 

UPON SEEING MY OWN MORTALITY
along with reflections on the true nature of regrets

I’ll reserve judgment till I finish writing this, but this article may be of a more serious nature and lack my usual devastating wit and charm.  You may want to skip this article entirely and go to the next one!  Or press on…  you may save yourself some angst in the future.

In metaphysics we often hear of ‘the lifting of the veil’ when we suddenly have a moment of incredible clarity into the nature of some issue we’re facing.  It’s as though a fog suddenly lifted and we see reality clearly, even painfully.  And the fog or cloud metaphor is very apt, for usually the clouds come back around within moments or hours and we wonder if we really did see so clearly.  In the Tarot this is portrayed in the Tower card where lightning strikes the tower and shatters that reality, but there are clouds pictured even in the Tarot card to show that illumination is usually temporary and transitory.

I had such an experience a few days ago and it was shattering.  For about 45 seconds I saw ahead to my own death.  But it was not seeing so much as feeling it.  Yes, I know from a left brain point of view that I will die and I have made a will and have all those things in order.   But to really have a feeling of the end was quite different.  If you saw the Hitchcock movie Vertigo you remember when Jimmy Stewart was trying to climb the bell tower stairs and the floor suddenly fell out from under him.  That was part of the sense of my experience.  It was an anxiety attack, in medical terms.  And no, I’m not sick…  don’t have a thyroid problem…  not overly stressed.  It was a one shot thing.

The event lasted seconds but the effect is still with me, and I think the effect will be positive.  Once I regained my composure, I asked myself why it had upset me so to realize the obvious.  I was surprised to get the clear message that there is much left undone in my life.  The real reason for my upset wasn’t in the dying but in the regrets I felt of things undone.  And here’s the really interesting part!

Once I realized I have regrets, I tried to define just what those regrets are and I was surprised at the answer.  I assumed I regretted the long lost dreams that will never be.  I’ll never be a concert pianist; I’ll never sing at the Met; I’m too old to be a world class athlete of any kind; age now keeps me from even attempting many careers that require years of study.  I tried to really ‘get into’ a feeling of regret for any of those lost hopes.  But nothing would come.  So, back at the meditative drawing board, I asked, “SO…  just what ARE these regrets that make me feel like weeping?”

The regrets that left me speechless are: the play that I’ve already written but left unrevised on the coffee table; the book that might help readers in their lives that I have mostly written and could easily finish; the body that is not really fully developed the way I want and could be with just a bit more caution in what I eat and a bit more intensity in the time I already spend in the gym; the full relationship that eludes me because I don’t really put much effort into it.

In short…  the regrets are not for the things that cannot be but for things that could be but aren’t.  Yet.

Regrets are not from here back in time but from here forward to the end, and as the time between now and death shortens, the feeling of regret intensifies.  For many people, it can be assuaged by a few more beers, another drug, more hours at the office, or any number of distractions.   But perhaps the better way is to get deeply honest with what those regrets really are and, in the best coaching model, make a plan of attack and actually accomplish these things so at the end there is no sense of regret or longing for what might have been.  Hopefully in the meantime, when that veil lifts again,  I won’t have need for an anxiety attack over my undone life but will sit back with a smirk knowing I’m fully engaged in ‘regret proofing’ myself.

If this resonates with you and you have fear of regrets, I suggest you either hire a coach to help you identify and attain your desires or work out a concrete plan of your own whereby you write down those things that could produce regret, make a time-line for each one where you list what would be needed to attain each goal, and then MARK IN YOUR CALENDAR what you plan to do each day or week so that when your end comes you too will smile a knowing smile of accomplishment not regret!

Back   |   Home