I have, as most people desire of being right and in control most of the time. When I was little I remember that some people, even at that time in our lives, questioned our decisions and made us think better about something by just saying to us: “I hope you don’t regret later”. We grow up with the knowledge that regrets are important. Sometimes after being in a problematic or uncomfortable situation we always think, for hours about ways we could have won or we see ourselves behaving differently, saying something actually clever. And we prefer our ending. Even though we say “I will act differently next time” or “This will not happen again” most of the times we act the similarly and end up making the same mistake, not many people actually change their behaviors. I consider that this happens because we try to forget our mistakes, we want to cover them. There is a saying “No regrets.” I can understand why we wouldn’t want to have regrets, after all no matter their magnitude, they are mistakes and we feel shameful about them. We all feel regret in daily basis, when we lose certain chances or take wrong decisions. Sadly, I consider that in this world full of critics it has become our tendency to give our mistakes the wrong type of importance. Because we actually live being concerned about them and that is why we tried to forget them, in the end we don’t learn anything from them.
As an example, being a freshman here in Ewha Womans University made me notice how much I had to learn, to organize. And I tried, but sometimes my tendency to procrastination won. The first times it happened I tried to think about that no regrets policy. Till I experience a truly a horrible consequence when I did it at the worst season: final exam period, that was the time I thought I could study several important topics for one of my courses in one-night. Afterwards my plan was to sleep for only two hours after studying, from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. Then waking up and go to my first class. That was my wish of course, but what really happened was that I ended up missing my morning class and a valuable time that I could have invested studying due to the fact that I overslept till 12 p.m. I will not lie, I felt so guilty because there was so many things I could have done instead of procrastinating, even though I knew it was bad I still did it. For many people it is not only procrastination, it can be spending money recklessly in things your don’t need or even lying. Naturally we come to a point where we just ask ourselves: when will I change? or better when will I realize I should pay more attention to my mistakes.
Well, hopefully this semester I will, and by that time I also hope to realize everyone is living differently and we all must go through experiences different times till we learn our lesson, sometimes is really easy to learn but sometimes it isn’t. Learning faster from your mistakes or the opposite doesn’t make you more or less than someone else. So right now I want to embrace my regrets and keep then close, because after all, we have all made mistakes,  they are definitely not the most pleasant memories and they can be disappointing but, they also bring a warning and a necessary lesson for our lives. So instead, forgetting the things we did wrong, let’s just embrace them, they are part of ourselves, next time all we have to do is try really hard to not make the same mistake again.

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