Regret Not!

Regret Not!

“The retrospectoscope has 20/20 vision.”
Mike Bromberg, D.D.S.

I don’t know about you, but I used to spend a lot of my time regretting things I had done or hadn’t done. Ok, I still do that…but not as much. That changed long ago when I was having lunch with my good friend, Dr. Mike Bromberg.

This was way before I was married and moaning about some girl whose name I can’t even remember now. Somehow, I had messed up my chance with her, and I was complaining about it to Mike. He listened politely and then said a few words that greatly improved my life, “The retropectoscope has 20/20 vision.”

How many times do we think, if only I hadn’t said that or if only I had done the other thing? We almost always follow up those kinds of self-tormenting questions with: then everything would be perfect.

Of course, real life doesn’t work that way. We make lots of right decisions and do and say the right thing most of the time, but somehow that by itself does not make life perfect.

Being human, we’re sometimes tempted to think that somehow if we had done just that one thing differently, then everything would have been perfect from that moment on. Baloney! So when Mike said those words to me many years ago, I pretty much stopped doing that.

Besides, some of our greatest blessings emerge out of the mistakes we have made. So give yourself a break from beating yourself up over anything. Put it behind you and take the next step in the direction of your dreams.