سرائیکی ڈیجیٹل لائبریری

Few feelings perplex us as much as regret. In our everyday life we treat it as something purely bad, a burden to be avoided, almost a mark of weakness. We keep telling one another to “live without regrets. But is this the whole truth? Surely not. The same regret which we condemn so easily is many a times the very thing that teaches us. It is regret which makes us pause, look back at our mistakes, and resolve to do differently. Without it there would be no learning, no correction, no growth. Hence the perplexity in its own quiet way, doing good work for us.

The word itself carries this double nature. The very word “regret” begins with the prefix “re-“, and this small prefix is full of meaning. It implies repetition, a turning back, a return to something that has already happened. Amitav Ghosh, in his book The Great Derangement, dwells upon this very sense while discussing the idea of recognition, a re-cognition, in which some prior awareness suddenly flashes before us, as if returning from the past. Regret too is such a return. It is the past coming back to knock at the door of the present. The “re-” reminds us that regret is never about the present alone. It always drags time backward.

Psychologically, this is exactly what happens. Regret involves a feeling of loss which occurred in the past but is realised only in the present. The event is over and done with, yet its weight is felt now, at this very moment. So past and present become essentially intertwined. What we call regret is, in truth, a work of memory, the manner in which the impressions and traces of an old loss are stored, arranged, and then linked, often unconsciously, with our present state of mind. We do not merely remember the loss. we re-live it, and in re-living it we suffer it once more.

This brings us to Freud and his famous distinction between mourning and melancholia, which holds the key to whether regret heals or harms. When the object of our loss is clear and known to us, mourning does its honest work. We acknowledge the loss, grieve it openly, and slowly pass through it to enter a new state of being. Such regret is healthy. But when the lost object is shadowy, half hidden in our consciousness, when we ourselves do not fully know what we have lost, then regret turns into melancholia. It becomes a misery without a name, a suffering that does not end, because one cannot properly mourn what one cannot clearly see.

Finally, the very subject of loss is trickier than we assume. We are in the habit of lamenting every loss, as though all loss were misfortune. But this is simply not the case. As Judith Viorst shows in her book Necessary Losses, many of our losses are necessary. We must give up certain attachments, illusions and dependencies in order to grow at all. Loss, then, is not always the enemy of life. At times it is its very condition. The Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah says this with great beauty. It teaches that God created the universe through an act of tzimtzum by contracting, withdrawing, squeezing Himself to make an empty space in which creation could come to be. Even creation demanded a loss. And perhaps regret, rightly understood, is only our small human echo of that same truth: that nothing new is born without something old being let go.