Here’s a way to think about regret. The feeling we surely all have at some point about something we wished we’d done differently, or about something we wished we’d done – or not done.
This feeling can only ever be solved through understanding what your body wants. Remember, when I say ‘what your body wants’ I mean unconsciously.
In the past, at the time of the thing you think about when you feel regretful, your body wanted something. Your nervous system reached out for a feeling but it failed to find it.
You can spend the rest of your life feeling dead inside, or sleepy somehow, wishing you’d done something differently when all your body wants is to find that feeling in the future. If you feel dead inside then it’s likely it’s lost hope (don’t ask me how a body does that). If it feels sleepy then sometimes you’re coming close.
When you find this feeling your life will become more predictable. It will have continuity because you will seem more present to those around you. They won’t automatically think about asking you to do something for them because they will experience you more like a rock in a stream than a sandbank or some weed floating beneath the surface. You’ll be more there. Less interruptible. More resilient.
This is how you find the special kind of resilience called agency.
Satisfy the feeling you experience through understanding what you regret.
Pay attention to things that you’d normally not be drawn to. Does any of it interest you?
If something does, concentrate on it. Just look at it. Where did it come from? Why is it there? Do you like it? What do your thoughts guide you to do? Consider doing it.
The way that your mind works means certain things, which might otherwise hold great significance for you, may remain if not invisible then as if they are not worth a second glance.
Think of Horatio Nelson peering into his telescope and announcing “I see no ships.“ His decision to ignore the approaching ships that he could in fact see was a strategic one. Your mind operates strategically, too, adding or subtracting significance to the way your recognise objects out in the world, to thoughts, to feelings, to dreams. Repression, dissociation: there are a various ways of clinically describing why this happens and what goes on inside you while you do it.
Sometimes you may do it only at certain times: when you are stressed, for example. Your focus changes according to your mental state, which shifts in line with whatever your body is doing to try and make everything in an ongoing experience add up and leave you okay. The problem is that ‘an ongoing experience’ will include many thoughts and feelings about events from the past that suggest how what’s happening presently may end. It doesn’t take much to make what you are trying to do now become an attempt to copy whatever your mind tells you would have been the right thing to do then, on a previous occasion.
That’s all very complicated. Simply focusing on what may normally escape your attention can give you a vital new perspective on life. You may start to see the world more fully, less telescoped, and including things, which, once upon a time might have been best avoided.
You may start to understand the special place in your life that something might have which could in the past have been too painful to include. And even if it’s simply a sock given to you by someone who loved you, I hope that you start to understand how lovable you really are.
Whatever you’re doing, imagine what you want to happen, don’t get caught up in trying to perform one particular stage of a task. This is harder than it sounds. Becoming distracted, ‘taking your eye off the ball’, is NOT what I mean.
I can best explain what I mean using some examples from cricket (the sport, not the insect).
Shane Warne was a fabulous bowler and he spoke about imagining, as he bowled, what shot he wanted the batsman to play. He didn’t focus on a spot on the pitch where he wanted the ball to land, as many coaches suggest you should do. He didn’t try to get ‘out of his head’, as other coaches might say. He held the ball very loosely (‘if I feel relaxed doing it, then I’ll be able to do what I want to do down that end’ [the end where the batter stood anxiously facing him]).
If you have a natural hesitation built into your ways of connecting you will tend to do life in segments. That’s like driving a car and having it stall again and again. Thinking imaginatively joins life up so that it flows.
Order your material things (and I mean everything) and things you can easily get hold of like dates of special events so that they make sense not just to you but to someone who you like who seems organised. Use your imagination to work out what this would be like. Sort, gather, sift, arrange, label, box, hang, or fold the whole lot. Give everything that you and other people can easily see a place in your life.
Then you can move on to the things that only you can see or feel.
Care structures things and too much of it or not enough of it in your early can leave you with unhelpful things happening in the way that you order your life. Things get lost, overlooked, damaged or forgotten, presenting you and others with a regular source of frustration. If you are a TV station your continuity person has gone missing. The producer’s drunk. The station cat is in charge.
Think about where care comes from. What it might be all about and how people, for thousands of years, have tried to recognise its force and effects.
The word ‘care’ comes from a very old word meaning to call or to shout. Allowing yourself to speak about your frustration, to call out the things which need attention, is essential.
But before you can do that something else needs to happen. People who experience frustration in their life are generally bad at collecting themselves. Their experiences, their interests, their thoughts: all of these things tend to be scattered and aren’t things you can see or touch easily. They’re like ghosts of wild cats. They remain unreceived, not properly picked up on because something about their occurrence has gone unnoticed.
Begin by ordering the things that you can see and touch and then move onto the cat ghosts.
All Life doesn’t happen easily. Maybe it seems sensible not to complicate it even further. Lead a simple life, you might think. It’s best.
But simplicity does not arrive like a birthday. Often, we cut ourselves off from complications. We might try to keep things simple by not saying disruptive things. We may only let the world know little versions of ourselves.
This piece is about the disruptive energy that we all possess. When we let it out in the right way it allows us to be bigger in the world. We feel less anxious. We stand the best chance of getting the life we need in order to be happy. If we trap it life becomes one long bum rap. A kind of a death. We drown in resentment and horrible complications. That energy is called anger.
Distance
Angry energy creates distance. If you are being messed with you need to feel you can show you don’t like it. You can say or do something and connect the angry feeling in you to the world outside you. This is angry energy going the right way: out of you, putting some distance between you and what you don’t want.
But if you feel angry and can’t connect that feeling in you to the world it will leave you feeling alone. You will avoid situations where something might happen that you don’t like. Your energy will go nowhere. You end up squashed in with it, silently enveloped by rage.
In a Rage
If your anger isn’t going anywhere you go a strange kind of still. You freeze in a rage.
How can you not get stuck like that? Budge. You need to keep moving. One of the things that can keep you moving is music. There are books, paintings and films, but music’s a good way to get going. Something tight, something in time.
What you don’t want is something spaced out. Something that’s gone so far it’s broken off. You want music to go just far enough to still be rude, shocking, brilliant in the way it opens the world up. Bach, Banshees, Last Poets.
Budgie Cage
You don’t want to be tranquilised by stupid music, silly novels or memes. Anger going nowhere does enough of that already. You yawn. You feel very sleepy. You feel bored because boredom is like a budgerigar cloth, the thing you hang over a cage. A budgie stops singing in a cage just like an angry person wiped out by their own irritation. So don’t stay still. That kind of still is like the dead calm before a storm. We talk about something being dead boring. Find some music, or anything that moves you. Something outside you that brings you to life. Don’t let your anger make you dead. Harness your anger like a rocket from the crypt.
Say Something
When you disagree, or when you feel hurt, or when you feel frustrated (which can be like a fraying rope that ties something in place) you need to know you can say something. If you can’t, you are mute.
You might decide to say nothing. But if you have no choice about being heard you will feel defeated, maybe hopeless. Life will feel really unsafe.
Disagreement is Our Edges
Friendship needs some disagreement, if you and your friends don’t want to end up being one big blob.
Disagreement is our edges, and our height, and our depth. Up there, over here, down there — that’s not you. It can helpfully interrupt love, like someone you love might interrupt you if you were eating like a pig. Disagreement reminds love to stop eating or it will just get fat to the point of an explosion.
A Big Scene
What’s it all about? What does it all mean? These questions are a waste of time. They make you think, and think, and think.
You need to be inside, not thinking about. What’s in it all? What’s happening? With these questions something can happen apart from frustration. Look, I could say something about what’s in it all? right away. The plant on the table in front of me, whose flowers look different every day.
What’s it all about? What does it all mean? You might put up with these two like party bores, and you know where that ends.
Problem Numero Uno
All the worst examples of anger are to do with men. Men who don’t get what they want — maybe they are ugly, stupid or boring, for instance. Rather than make the best of a bad job, to wise up or stop talking rubbish, these men think the people they are scaring, stupefying, or boring need to shape up.
This is what happens. The world’s a place where men can do that. Do you know many women who do that? I don’t think so. Where can the energy come from to change this? This is problem numerouno because there’s something about Rome in all of it: Caesar, Catholics, etc.
A Lot of Pretending
If you fear putting your toe in the water, sometimes in your mind’s eye you might pretend to freeze, get eaten by a crocodile, drown and so on. A lot of the time a lot of pretending goes on.
Pretending is when something gets put off. Something’s still happening when you put things off. Angry energy is a step forward into the water which is for real.
A Little Scene
You might miss what you want from him, but you won’t miss him. That’s a disagreement.
Laugh
If life feels unsafe it feels unjust. Cancel culture is because people feel unsafe. The kind of people you’d want to cancel, don’t bother. Laugh at them instead. Try it. Point at someone awful and laugh. It’s better than cancelling them. Comedy is the most amusing form of anger. Kafka laughed so loud when he read out The Trial that he had to stop. Thomas Bernhard exterminates stupidity with the force of his wit.
Avoid satire and sarcasm which are like vomiting into the wind.
Life is Written
Anger allows justice. Justice allows respect. Without respect nothing is safe. Without anger there will only be injustice.
Everything has to be contested, always and for ever. You might believe that there is a magic law written into to life saying: this is right. No, justice is something that you fight for. All that is written into life is what you write into it. You must be able to make a case for what you believe, or nobody will believe anything at all. They will simply insist that something is right. Or wrong, and try to cancel it. Or cancel you.
Hope
A lovely person who listens won’t tell you what to do. They will give you a weapon for the future: something to believe in. There may be justice in the future if you have friends who you can trust, and that keeps your angry energy out in the world, like a ship on high seas.
A Great Bomb
To stop resentment killing you, you need kind, thoughtful people who will not forget what has happened to you and who agree deeply, all the way through, that it is wrong. They say they will not forget. When you know people like this it feels good. They catch your angry energy, holding it in the world, and help make it a great loving bomb.
It becomes the wrong kind of bomb, liable to explode in your face, when you talk about it with a bitter fanatic who tells you what to do. They throw your energy back at you. Catch: here’s some hate.
Close Enough
Things change in a moment. I hope you’re not the kind of person who says change takes a long time. If you are, go back to the beginning and you might see what’s changed. Saying change takes a long time is pretending it hasn’t happened. It’s trying to put it off, which as I’ve said is not a way to stop something happening.
So where can you find the energy to make a difficult change? To change the world? That’s what this piece wants to know. It’s all about desire, which is a lot about love, and a lot about anger. Love brings things together. Anger says: that’s close enough.
