Thou hast been called, O Sleep! the friend of woe;
But ’tis the happy that have called thee so.
Southey.
Sometimes we lie awake at night to regret some action of our own because the result has not been what we desired or expected. “John the Unafraid” says that “if your misfortune is not your own fault, you have much to be glad of. If it is your own fault you have more to be glad of, since you can prevent that misfortune from occurring again.” In either case, therefore, you may follow the advice given so many years ago, “Rejoice evermore.” At least it is evident that in neither case need you lose sleep over it: for, according to your light, you did what seemed to you at the time best for you to do.
For, to quote Epictetus again, it is not possible “to judge one thing to be best for me and seek another.” The thing you did, you did because it seemed best to do that, and to regret now and wish you had done something else is, in reality, to wish that you had been a different person from what you were, which is a foolish regret, or, that you had done something different from what seemed best to do. That would be a mild form of insanity. You don’t really regret that you were not insane?
It has no bearing on the case that the outcome has proved that you were mistaken. You might never have learned that your course was not best for you or for others, except by doing just as you did. Now you have that much more knowledge than you had before, and you can use it to help you another time. A man can’t do any better than he can. You cannot do more than you know, and you only know what you have learned by experience. The great majority of us learn only in the school of personal experience; the few wise ones learn some things through the experience of others, by relating or applying their own experience to the events in the lives of others. Comparing and reflecting, they come to see the close relation of act and consequence, and thus recognize the universal laws in operation.
Such wisdom may be yours, but it will not come through regretting that you did not possess it ready-made. Besides, no misfortune, whether we are ourselves directly responsible for it or not, is ever in vain. No matter how hard and almost unendurable the “misfortune” may have seemed at the time, we shall find in looking back that it was no unmixed evil. The terrible calamity has often been the turning-point in our lives. It made us pause and think, and, through the thinking, we have achieved development of which we were otherwise incapable.
Even when we do not always see this for ourselves, partly because we are not always good judges of our own development or progress, we see it plainly in the lives of others. A friend of mine once said to me of a woman who was doing a tremendous work in the world, “I remember when she was just a selfish society woman.” “What changed her?” I asked.
“Oh, she lost her only daughter very suddenly. It was a terrible blow, and her friends thought she would never recover. But she did, and those who love her best know that that heavy sorrow was really a blessing in disguise. Think what she is now!” I smiled appreciatively, for my friend was herself still smarting from a keen disappointment which she had not yet recognized as a blessing in disguise. But recognizing it in another’s life must eventually help her to see it in her own.
If our misfortune has come from a selfishness that we might have overcome, and did not, we shall not better matters by wasting time in regret. “Repentance”—which is the only emotion such a misfortune should arouse—“is to up and act for righteousness, and forget that you ever had relations with sin.” Unless we “bring forth fruits meet for repentance,” our repentance is lost, and we are indeed worse off than if we had felt none.