Regret

 I wrote on this blog recently that it was only in the last few months—well into my second semester of law school, that I allowed myself to indulge the possibility of regret about going to law school. Since I published that post, I have added a few variations on the feeling to my inner stew: regret not only at going to law school, but at going to this particular law school; at having moved so far; at having decided too precipitously and based on a mad rush which school I should attend just in order to be done with the decision, rather than giving it the deliberation and thought of long-term consequences it required. 

Up to now, these suspicions had all been firmly consigned to the ranks of the Forbidden Thoughts. I placed them under this taboo because the regrets could only be futile (it's too late now) and because having made my choice and invested so much already I wanted to convince myself it could only have been a wise decision (sunk costs fallacy). Even more fundamentally, there seemed to be nothing to be gained from asking what might have happened, since the answer is fundamentally unknowable. Any regrets could only rest on unfalsifiable counterfactuals that can provide no guidance. 

To be sure, I know there are large parts of law school I do not enjoy. But would this really have been any less the case at any other school? Generations of law students have warned generations of aspiring law students that it would not be: the same fundamental misery is shared across the profession. So why worry about what might have happened if I had gone someplace else? 

Despite all these interdictions, however, the regrets kept hammering at my inner door and demanding a hearing. I was terrified of letting them gain entrance. Part of my anxiety stems from the inherent ambiguity and paradox in a haunting line from the opening of Richard Ford's great novel The Sportswriter: "if sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies," Ford's narrator relates, "it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined."  

This line went through my mind in recent weeks, and I wondered what it counseled. The line could be read to warn in either of two directions. Is allowing oneself to contemplate and really feel the possibility of regret a way of "facing" that danger? Or, by letting it across one's mental threshold, has one failed in one's appointed task to "avoid it," and therefore it will now rush in, and overwhelm one, and destroy one's life? 

For whatever reason, though, I proved incapable of avoiding it, despite (or, as we'll see, because of) my dread. The thoughts kept begging for entrance, and finally I gave in. The levies broke. The flood washed in. Talking to a friend last night, I allowed myself to utter aloud all the long-forbidden and stifled thoughts: did I make a terrible mistake? Have I ruined my prospects? Could everything have gone so much better if I'd just made a few key hasty decisions ever so slightly differently? 

Now I've done it, I thought. I've let in the thoughts. Yet, when I woke the next morning, everything seemed fine. I had allowed myself to ask all the forbidden questions. Did I choose the wrong school? Have I ruined everything? Yet, having asked them, it seemed by no means obvious the answer to all these questions was unmistakably "yes." It seemed the answer might be "no," or "who cares?," or "so what—it's imperfect; imperfection is inherent in life." In short, I felt the regret had been faced; even the terrible, searing regret. And it had not ruined my life. 

The lesson I take from this has something to do with what contemporary clinical psychologists describe as "acceptance therapy." Like many great therapeutic insights, it derives its power from the fact that it is fundamentally counterintuitive. The basic idea of it is this: the best way to stop ruminating on oppressive and disturbing thoughts (such as the "what if?" and the "terrible, searing regret") is not to force yourself to stop thinking about them or to distract yourself from them. The thoughts will pursue you no matter what interdictions you put on their expression. Rather, let yourself think them through without any resistance. 

Once you do so, you often discover the rumination itself stops. This is because a great deal of what the rumination was chasing its tail about in the first place was one's inner struggle to stop ruminating. Call off the quest to halt it, and the thoughts stop too. The advice is much the same as that a character in a Steinbeck novel gives to a soldier who is trying to stop himself thinking about the trauma of war. In the advice he gives, Steinbeck's fictional officer seems to have stumbled through practical experience on an insight that many professional psychotherapists would approve today: 

Trouble is, [says the officer, in an episode recalled by the protagonist in Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent, and speaking of traumatic memories] a guy tries to shove it out of his head. That don’t work. What you got to do is kind of welcome it. […] Take it’s something kind of long – you start at the beginning and remember everything you can, right to the end. Every time it comes back you do that, from the first right through to the finish. Pretty soon it’ll get tired and pieces of it will go, and before long the whole thing will go. 

This advice—to stop rumination by welcoming the rumination; to fight rumination by not fighting it—has a beauty to it because it partakes of the same paradox that underlies so many valid strategic insights across disciplines. When John Barth advised postmodern writers, instead of denying or resisting the exhaustion of traditional literary modes, to create fiction premised precisely on that exhaustion, he was essentially advising a sort of "acceptance therapy" for litterateurs. When advertising gurus Jack Trout and Al Ries told businesspeople in the 1980s to embrace the public's preexisting attitudes to their products through "positioning," rather than try to cut against them, they were practicing "acceptance therapy" for marketers. 

There appears to be a great truth in human life across all categories of endeavor, then, that the best way to overcome an obstacle or face down a challenge is often not to resist it, but to welcome it. This, perhaps, is what resolves the paradox of Richard Ford's passage too, which—gnomic as it is—has an undeniable ring to it of experience and truth. One must indeed "avoid" letting regret destroy one's life. But the only way to do so is to "face" it—to let it wash over one; to allow it entry across the mental threshold; to let oneself  confront the possibility of its truth in all its agony. Then, and only then, can one divest it of its power.