The Torrential Downpour of Regret

How to be a Game Changer in Accepting Regrets and Moving On

My family and I have always gone back to southern India every few years to visit our extended family in the summer months. The first months of the summer bear an intense heat that leaves a slick cast over our foreheads. That is until the month of August arrives when the monsoon season initiates a feat of endless showers to cool the air. It ushers a wave of water in a scurry, until it disappears before the sun’s return, lingering into the remnants of an evening dew. Whenever I could catch a glimpse, there was always something mesmerizing about the monsoon rain. It seemed like that in every crevice of the world, I’d always be looking at the same sun, but experiencing this rain was something I couldn’t absorb anywhere but there. Especially since it’s one of the rare times I can feel the buzz of the world halt to let the storm pass by until it simmers down to the sound of raindrops pattering on the clay roads.

Since the last time I’d been to India, there had been plenty of changes that swept through my family in three years time. The one I was most nervous about was the loss of both of my grandfathers, whom I’d seen during my last visit. I’d been mentally preparing myself to pick back up from the grieving process I’d started when I’d first found out about their deaths because the lack of their presence would feel heavier in a place I’d grown up expecting them to be. Surprisingly, the weight I’d actually felt on the trip turned out to be the last few years of regret pouring down on me at once like the monsoon showers pelting the barred windows outside my grandmother’s home. And just like in the midst of a storm, there came a surging flood of delayed realizations just weeks before the start of my last year of college.

Reflecting on my entire college experience during this time felt like a rite of passage to subconsciously prepare myself for the anticipated changes to come the following year. In general, I’ve been told countless times that even to the blind eye, it’s noticeable when the gears in my head are turning. Regardless of the deep reflection, it’d been a well-proven fact that with time, change always trails behind. I have friends knee-deep in their respective grad schools and family moving to the other side of the country in the coming months. As intimidating as these big changes make themselves out to be, what feels scarier is wondering if the four best years of my life were what I had hoped them to be, or if they were just riddled with regret. Personally, the whole mantra of living a life with no regrets had always remained a procrastinated ideology that I’d eventually embody one day. And the older I’ve gotten, the more normalized it’s felt to occasionally let some opportunities slip through the cracks of my naivety. Because we often strive to pursue every moment with the intention of a certain outcome, but in the heat of the moment, that can change whether it’s at our own will or not. Among the complicated entanglement of regrets I’d piled up through the years, they’ve always seemed connected to one common thread, and that was being complacent.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes “complacency” as a form of “self-satisfaction”. So when I realized I’d only familiarized myself with the activities and people introduced to me during my freshmen year, I ironically found myself plateauing on a straight road to dissatisfaction. By no means is there anything particularly wrong with the comfort and stability that comes from complacency. However, it’s within human nature, as pictured in Maslow’s pyramid of hierarchal needs, that most of us crave reaching our full potential and the fulfillment that comes with self-actualization. So, halfway through my junior year, I realized that the worldly bubble I stepped foot in a few years ago now couldn’t house all of the needs that’d developed since my freshmen year. There then came a mixture of forcing myself to try new things and quitting old things to expand that bubble to encompass my new and growing persona.

However, with graduation less than a year away, I’d grown weary of making seemingly minor changes knowing it came with drastically unexpected outcomes. Mostly because I’d been replaying a mental movie of myself running to catch a train that had already begun its embark to a new destination. I think most of us can feel this shift into the next stage of our lives, especially when the building pressure to live up to the expectations and timelines still linger from a different time. A time in which we were too naive to realize that you really can’t be late for your own life, and so if you don’t like something about it, there’s no better time to change it than now. And all of those regrets I’ve collected over the past three years paint their own timeless tale of the inevitable truth of growing up. It’s that just like the intensity of the monsoon season every summer at my grandmother’s home, the burden of this torrential downpour of regret will cease to a misty haze. And then with enough time and thought, this fleeting feeling will disappear into a newfound scene of clarity.