#15/120 - Regret doesn't have to be wasted pain
Hi! I am Summerbud. If you’re someone who keeps hitting the same walls, making similar mistakes, feeling the same regrets, this essay is for you.
Hi! I am Summerbud.
If you’re someone who keeps hitting the same walls, making similar mistakes, feeling the same regrets, this essay is for you.
It’s about what to do with regret when it comes.
Take a moment to imagine this with me. Picture it slowly, letting the details form in your mind.
There is a campfire, where is it? What does the air smell like? Is the wind blowing? Is there any sound from the wildlife?
Who’s sitting around it? Name three people you love. See their faces.
They’re all looking at you because you’re about to share something. You’re going to tell them the three frameworks you’ve built from your failures.
The three systems that changed how you handle a crisis.
What are they?
Take your time.
It’s a hard question; before the incident I am going to share, I didn’t even recognize its importance.
It’s all about the fundamental emotion we have, regret. It lasts longer than envy, stronger than anger, and hurt more than grief. It is one of the most dangerous feelings in our lives, but it’s not essentially bad. If it works correctly, it’s the greatest fuel for our growth.
The regret is only dangerous when it’s unprocessed, unlearned and left there as it never happened. Regret isn’t the enemy. Wasted regret is.
Let me share a story from my journey in Canada. I made a dumb mistake, although it’s not a life-threatening one, and it looks small when I look back from writing it. It does ring the warning bell for me. Most important of all, it serves as the foundation for me to develop a mindset to not waste any bad decisions I make.
The beautiful Emerald Lake
Emerald Lake is located in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, in Yoho National Park. It’s a beautiful place, a visual wonderland for people like me who enjoy photographing.
In the open area where the glacier moves into the lake in winter. I took a shot which was supposed to be a good one. But when I look closely, I discover that my photo has some weird black dot on it. It didn’t feel right; something had happened on either the lens or the CMOS1.
I first looked at my lens and tried to clean it up, but it didn’t work, then I found a place which looked clean, sat on the ground, and took off the lens. I can see there is some dust on my COMS, but I didn’t bring my blower this time. At that moment, I first felt hesitant, but I want to get back to this beautiful scene as fast as possible. I didn’t consider that much, then I breath a deep breath, blow wind on my CMOS, the first try look good, the dust is blown away, so I tried the second time, it’s this time I spit on the CMOS, it looks terrible, the spit is all over the place, I can’t do anything about it, if I try to wipe it out I am risking scraping my CMOS and it’s far worse than the dust.
At that moment, I knew I fuck up terribly.
I sat on the ground, looking around for my friend, but I couldn’t find them. I put up the lens and try to shoot some images. They all look bad, with lots of black points in the photo.
I feel a deep regret. The camera is broken, and at that moment, I have no way to fix it. That regret is not only for what I have done but also a shameful feeling, a person who has shot pictures for more than five years, didn’t understand that you can’t do to your CMOS with that kind of behavior. It’s an extremely hard feeling, with a rational understanding that it’s a small thing, you can fix it in Taiwan easily, but you are in Canada, you can’t even connect to the internet here, with such a beautiful view in front which is hard to reach for you. That is a very deep regret.
I met my friend beside the small boathouse, I told him what happened. He didn’t laugh or judge my actions, but simply said, if he was in my shoes he would also be in an extremely bad mood too. We don’t have any way to fix my camera at that moment, so I put my camera back into the bag. With regret brewing, I am trapped within it.
Besides the Natural Bridge Waterfall
Later that day, we drove to the Nature Bridge waterfall near the Emerald Lake, we went across the bridge and got into the woods to have our lunch.
Sitting on the wood, I hold my chicken wrap, thinking about my camera and how stupid I am to do that action. I begin to revisit the whole situation.
I start to observe.
What I’m really upset about?
It’s not the broken camera, it’s not the shameful feeling that I need to reveal this with my friend, it’s partially because I will miss the opportunity to shoot beautiful pictures around the lake, but that is not the full picture. I have a deeper instinct that this connects to a much bigger issue.
How do I cope with an emergency?
First, I run fast, I want to get back to normal as fast as possible. I want a shortcut.
What is my personality revealed in this experience?
I am action-biased, I want to finish fixing stuff by myself.
This kind of pattern has happened several times, although I can’t name them right in the reflection, but I know, “I am not thoughtful enough.” And what if something much more severe happens next time, and I make a mistake due to a similar reason? I begin to think: How can I reduce the chance for myself to do something bad in a much severe accident?
I remember that emergency treatment like CPR has a mnemonic framework 2 as CABD or. ABC3 to help people remember what to do in that kind of situation, maybe I can develop one for myself.
When my friend was almost finished with his wrap, I came up with a thinking framework, SSPA.
S stands for Stop. When the unexpected challenge hits, when the adrenaline is pumping, the first thing I should do is to stop myself from fixing it with my intuition. Pause for a second, I can use “Alternate Nostril Breathing”4 to calm myself down.
The second S stands for Search. Looking around, now I have clear eyesight and thoughts. Try to search for help, either from other people or from the internet. I need different perspectives to help me to evaluate the situation.
P stands for Plan. Right now I might have a helping hand, a set of solutions to pick from. I need to plan the next step. But don’t try to find the perfect solution, I am doing my best in a limited time.
A stands for ACTION, I know in some circumstances, when everything is cooling down, when the situation becomes much heavier than it initially seems, we will become more hesitant to take action. But this is a reminder that we are not going to escape from the situation; we are still in our original goal, trying to solve something, so action is necessary. When I am ready, just do it.
But after all, SSPA is just one framework I built and it’s for me, I doubt it can be universal to others, for example, it can’t be used in life threatening situations and it also might not be suitable for a person who is not action-biased.
The real skill isn’t memorizing SSPA or borrowing this framework from me and trying it. It’s what happened by that waterfall. It’s the process of sitting with regret, observing and accepting who you are, and then developing your own tool around it.
How to build your own
When to build?
The reason I forced myself to build the framework at that moment is due to the fact that I know there is something fundamental wrong in my coping mechanism. I observed that I am easily following my intuition when in a hurry and they are not 100% helpful, sometimes even harmful. I accept that I have this kind of characteristic, but at the same time, I want to put some guardrails on it.
The timing is crucial, just like when you wake up, you will quickly forget the details in the dream, you will also quickly lose the details of the accident, those details are what make a difference.
So when you observe yourself having some repeated pattern keep showing up, and every time the regret hits, it stings, brews, and cultivates long term pain. You can consider building a framework around it.
How to build it
1. Observe Don’t Blame
It’s not hard to build a framework, but it’s hard to sit with your own regret and reflect on it. Not blaming yourself, not focusing too much on the action you did at that moment, instead, walking several steps back. Zoom out! Treat yourself like an observer, and you are going to observe the whole thing replay.
I know it’s painful, it’s hard, and unintuitive. But this is the crucial first step, the methodologies are less important at this stage, we are focusing on ourselves, who we really are when the challenge hits, are you action-biased or thought-biased? Are you easily triggered or not? Are you detail-oriented or not? How do you cope with high stress?
These questions can be better answered under pressure, in this kind of rare and emergency occasion, you can look into who you truly are.
2. Build Something Portable
Then it’s time for a framework, or we can call it methodology. This part should be free style, but I can give you some breadcrumbs here. The core is we try to keep it simple. To a level which you can hang on your mind, and there is a warning red sign, whenever a bad thing happens, the red sign will begin to ring and flashing, and you can see the rule you hang there.
Let’s take SSPA for example. It’s a starting words framework which is by default easier to remember. And to further strengthen the correlation between the emergency and my actions I develop a metaphor for it. “Superman in the SPA”, In an emergency, we want a hero who answers our call, but the hero is in the SPA, I need to count on myself. It also tells me I need to calm myself down in this kind of situation (Just like in the SPA, chilling.)
3. Share with others
The final step is sharing it with others. Not just the framework but also the whole story, I know it feels shameful to share our own mistake, but that is the whole point, by sharing your regret and how you cope with it, it drags you out of the wet, dirty, and dark inner cave, out to the light. And also, by sharing your mistakes actively, you will find yourself opening another door for others to share theirs. It’s very powerful.
Let’s get back to the first question I asked at the start of this essay.
“Can you name three personal frameworks you built from your failures?”
Remember the warm, earthy, woody campfire, you are surrounded by the people you love and cherish. Sharing your story and the framework you developed from it is the best gift to the world.
Closing
To stay in the long game, what we need to do is not try to avoid regret, but have the will power to get across and learn from regret. We are doing our best at every step of our life, learning from them and building a framework around it. With every small step like this, we will know ourselves better, have more control on our emotions and make clear decisions.
Whenever we make a decision, knowing that you won’t regret it because this is the best choice you can make at that moment, and by using the framework you built from previous failure, you learned something new even if you failed this time. That is the most powerful gesture you can make for challenges.
Don’t let your regret be wasted pain.
Thanks
Thanks Lucy for reading the draft of this essay.
Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor: It’s the heart of a camera, can be used as a kind of image sensor.