When I feel like a failure, it’s easy to tell myself there’s no point in trying, because I already suck…
— from an article by Kristin Wong, ‘The Biggest Wastes of Time We Regret When We Get Older’ on Lifehacker, January 2016.
When we’re young and foolish, we don’t worry about wasting time. Hey, we have text messages to respond to! Football games to watch! We have to argue with our significant other over the correct ‘darkness’ setting on the new toaster!
But then we get older. (Happens to the best of us.) And we notice the huge amount of time we’ve wasted during our lives. And we have the opportunity to regret it.
I don’t consider myself an ‘older’ person, but I can imagine myself as an older person, regretting the precious time I wasted on things that really didn’t matter.
In my imagination, I am much older, and living in an extended care facility named Sunshine Suites, surrounded by other older people who are likewise sitting around, maybe in wheelchairs, regretting. My cat, Roscoe, also very old, is curled up on my lap. He, of course, has no regrets. (I’m not sure if cats are allowed in extended care facilities, but this is just my imagination, so let’s pretend, shall we?)
We’re sitting in the recreation room. There’s a piano against the wall. No one has played it the entire time I’ve lived here. Next to the piano is a treadmill, also perpetually ignored. The bookshelf is full of Nora Roberts romance novels — a small selection of the 500 million published copies of Ms. Roberts’ books — but there’s very little interest in romance here at Sunshine Suites. We are more interested in regretting things.
Over by the ficus plant, I see my fellow inmate Anna, knitting a sweater for her son… the one who comes to visit her once a month. It’s really quite an ugly sweater, and I find myself wondering if Anna is trying to punish her son for something, because he will have to wear this god-awful thing at least once a month.
Anna had a falling out with her daughter 20 years ago, so the daughter doesn’t ever come to visit. As she knits the sweater, Anna is thinking about the past. Specifically, she is replaying the argument in her kitchen, all those years ago, that resulted in an estranged daughter. She has regrets about that argument. Mainly, she regrets that she didn’t threaten to cut her daughter out of her will. Anna is pretty sure she would have won the argument with that simple threat.
And so, she has regrets. But she doesn’t regret knitting ugly sweaters for her son.
Brad is another resident of my facility. I see him sitting at a table by the window, at a chess board, playing against himself. There is no one else living in Sunshine Suites who plays chess — something that Brad failed to take into consideration when he chose this facility. Actually, Sunshine Suites wasn’t his first choice, but one of the attorneys at his old law firm had spoken highly of it, and Brad has listened to the attorney’s advice.
So, he has regrets.
Before his divorce, he’d played chess regularly with his wife Judy. He had to teach her how to play, and he’d occasionally let her win, just to keep her interested. But after a couple of years, he noticed that she was winning games regularly, and finally, it got to the point where she was beating him, every game.
Hence, the divorce.
Brad isn’t sure if he regrets teaching her how to play, but now that he’s sitting alone at Sunshine Suites, playing against himself, he wonders if the divorce was really a good idea.
He doesn’t regret the time he spends playing chess by himself.
Now Barb, the facility troublemaker, comes rolling into the room in her wheelchair, in a bad mood as usual. She heads right over to where Anna is sitting, and accuses her of fooling around with Charlie, one of the more debonair men at Sunshine Suites, and with whom Barb plays cribbage every Thursday afternoon.
Anna claims she doesn’t even know who Barb is talking about, which is a bold-faced lie, because Anna’s room is right next door to Charlie’s room.
Voices rise, and Anna threatens to cut Barb out of her will. Brad looks up from his chess game and tells the two women to ‘take it outside’, knowing full well that they can’t even hear him because they’re both half deaf.
Barb is now in tears, and cries out, “I’m sorry I ever saw your face!”
I am watching all of this, in my imagination, and I think to myself, ‘Is everything we do — absolutely everything — just a big waste of time?’
I hate to say it, but we’re all headed for eternity, in this or that location, where time will be essentially meaningless. E
I slowly realize that asking myself, “Is everything we do just a big waste of time?” is also a waste of time.
But the biggest waste?
Regret.