My heart has been closed for renovations the last few years which has been completely necessary.
I haven’t reopened it yet, but I have been exploring what it might look like if it did…I wasn’t putting a lot of energy into it, but it’s definitely been floating around in my consciousness.
In Gabrielle Bernstein’s book, The Universe Has Your Back, she talks about little prayers/mantras to speak to the Universe, which I loved and have adopted, so my mantra lately has been “please lovingly turn me into the person I need to be for what’s coming next”. (The lovingly part is important because the universe has no judgement and will answer in ways that don’t always feel like love – I learned this the hard way).
I have been so focused on my blog and the course I’m building lately, I expected this mantra to find a way to help me with the parts I’ve been working on there.
I must have that part more under control than what’s going on with my heart because out of the blue, a boyfriend from my life 20 years ago shows up bringing me all kinds of stories and messages about who I used to be… the part of me I had forgotten about and disconnected from.
It was like I was in “The Christmas Carol” and getting a “loving” visit from the ghost of Christmas past.
Not all of the stories shed me in a very nice light, and even the ones that did were hard to hear because I had left so much of myself behind.
Just like Ebenezer Scrooge I was reassessing who I was in the past.
As I have processed the many conversations we have now had, I found myself swimming around in pools of regret.
Regret for the things I said, the choices I made, and the paths I chose that led me so far away from who I was back then.
Unlike Scrooge, I didn’t get the “Ghost of Christmas’s to Come” visit me the next night so that I could easily change my ways.
Regret is not somewhere I like to hang out, so when I realized this was what I was feeling, I took another piece of advice from Gabrielle Bernstein’s book and asked myself, “what would it look like if regret were fun?”
The answer didn’t come to me right away and I became busy with other things and forgot about it.
A few hours later, I went to the grocery store. For those of you who are friends with me on Facebook, you would have seen this post.
The next 3 hours were the most fun I have ever had on Facebook.
The 77 comments on that post were my friends/family laughing at the stories and sharing their stories and “fashion faux-pas” of their own.
I laughed until I cried, and then I laughed some more. I was so wound up from it I could barely sleep that night. I love so much when people come together like that (but I especially love it when they are my people).
The next day as I was still giggling about the stories, I realized that was the answer to my question.
That is what regret looks like when it’s fun… it doesn’t feel bad at all.
There are 2 morales to this story.
The first is that the Universe does have your back (thank you Gabrielle Bernstein), and it is constantly answering you so be careful what you are asking for.
The second is that if we stop taking ourselves so seriously, moments that could be seen as regret (like wearing your pants inside out to the grocery store) can instead become some of our favourite memories❤️.