In one of the episodes of The Crown, Queen Elizabeth has a moment of silence, away from life at the palace. She had been visiting horse farms in France, United States, with a childhood friend and a horse connoisseur (the Queen was passionate about horseback riding, horse racing). At the table, she reflects on how her life could have been if she had done what she was passionate about, with her loved ones, around whom she could be herself, without protocols, enormous responsibilities.
The queen talks about the unlived life, a kind of ‘other road’ in the forest, from the poetry of Robert Frost (The Untrodden Road), that path she could not have chosen.
This scene made me think of the regrets we may have, the thoughts that sometimes cross our minds about what our lives might have been like if …
We all make choices at various times. Choosing to go to college or not, to get married, to separate, in some cases, to have children or not, to work somewhere or to be your own boss, to travel the world or to live a life closer to home, to invest in our passions or to live from one day to the next, to live in our homeland or to leave, or even to return, to enter politics or not, to make your own decisions or blame others for your own grievances, love or avoid relationships and so on. Anyway, maybe we have an idea, a question, hidden somewhere in our minds, about the unlived life, about what it would have been like if we had gone the other way.
Any choice also involves giving up, and giving up can come with regrets.
From time to time it may be good to stop and see what regrets we have; what can we do to have a life as assumed and with as few regrets as possible from now on? Let’s accept what it was, how it was, the idea that we could do so at one point, but decide to do otherwise so that the regrets are less.