The sun was shining brightly on Galway, Ireland as Mr Kamil Krolak got his equipment ready for the shooting. He needed fifty correspondents to answer one question only - what is your best biggest regret in life. Not the kind of question people would like to reminisce on, moreover in a bright lovely Sunday. Thankfully finding the correspondents wasn’t much of a trouble though they won’t know yet the question they were about to be asked.
“What is your biggest regret?” asked Mr Kamil Krolak. One correspondent bit her lip; another found humor in it and smiled. A girl with thick Irish accent laughed, “Oh god!” and an older women just looked to the sky above, thoughtful look on her face, surely she has lived long enough to suffer disappointments in life. “You have to choose one?”
“I left my family”. Unlike most correspondents, Mr Fondumgee from Cameroon answer came immediately. Mr Krolak’s question might just ruin his perfect Sunday. His long regretful face gave the telling, it’s one mistake he wish he didn’t do and you can sense it’s one that he’ll never be able to rectify. An old women in her fifties, Mrs Collinmore answered, “That I didn’t live for joy sooner. I should have started living joy sooner.” Such answer can only come from seasoned women, been through a lot of disappointments only to realize as she aged older, that regretting mistake she made was actually the biggest mistake she ever made. A simple and logical premise that young mind will never understand. She was smiling, maybe relieved that at least she somehow realized that life is short and one should try to enjoy as much as he or she can.
“I'm not twenty years younger”, pondered sixty eight years old Mr Ted Kay.
“That I didn’t spend more time with my dad. He passed away now,” local lad Johannah sadly answered.
“That I cheated on my forty years old girlfriend at a host bar. I was totally in love with her and she was absolutely gorgeous, Scottish girl. I had a little bit of drink and I messed around with another girl. She walked in on us.” Mr Derek reminded us on how one irresponsible night of drinking can ruin everything.
“Not marrying that last (pointing to the background where his wife presumably was) when we were in high school fifty years ago and letting her moved up to Canada. And meeting her fifty years later and finally married her; we’ve been married for one year.” Veteran Joe Harvey shared with us his heartwarming love story.
“Actually I try not to regret anything. I think otherwise you just become lost in doom and gloom. So I think the best thing to do is, take life as it comes, enjoy it and don't bother with regret, they are not worth the effort.” Mrs Anders with her word of wisdom. Rightly so, rightly so.
However there are so many we can learn by listening to others regrets. Not just that we can learn what we should do being in certain circumstances, we can learn that life goes on, no matter how hard it is. How tough the future may look, life goes on. And the sometimes things aren’t bad as it looks like. And it is true, that there is light at the end of tunnel, regardless of how long the tunnel lies. It’s worth mentioning that from this interview, most correspondents shared that their regrets came from something they didn’t do. They were a lot of “I should have” and “I did not”, reminding us that perhaps we regret things we were too afraid to do and end up not doing it more than doing risky things and messing it all up. Borrowing words from JK Rowling, “Everyone makes mistake unless they live so carefully that they might as well not live at all.”
But when you do make a mistake, it’s only human to regret it. However if we are lucky, we will live long enough to realize that regretting over something that we can never go back to is just a waste of time. Some took years to discover this and some took lesser as an old man ended his brief interview, “Is that the question? I have none, I’m alive and I’m happy to be here.”
Regret I had a few, but then again to few to mention,
I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption,
I planned each charted course, each careful step along the by way,
And more, much more that this, I did it my way.
Frank Sinatra – I did it my way
So, what is your biggest regret in life?
