Turning from "the highway of regret" onto "that freedom highway"
“The storms are raging on the rollin’ sea / And on the highway of regret” -Bob Dylan, “Make You Feel My Love”
Before Dylan released the song quoted above, Sinatra sang, “Regrets, I've had a few / But then again, too few to mention.” In contrast to “Ol’ Blue Eyes,” who “traveled each and every highway,” doing it his way with negligible regrets, the way I’ve done it has resulted in too many regrets to mention. To borrow Dylan’s metaphor, I’ve been walking down regret’s highway, increasingly disturbed by the view.
Still, working through the emotional experience affords an opportunity to course correct, or so one can hope.
It does seem like an appropriate time to find my way. Regrets have been brewing for a bit.
When my dad died in 2019, I immediately regretted not doing more to try to improve our relationship while he was alive, even as I know that would’ve been much easier said than done, and even as I know he and I still had love for each other.
When my mom died in 2021, only a few hours before I was scheduled to fly back to Illinois to see her and other family and friends, I regretted waiting as long as I did to return to visit.
I regret some of what I’ve done recently as well — and the way I’ve handled psycho-emotional stressors. Those stressors have been building while they’ve been simultaneously neglected. Neglecting to sufficiently attend to them paved the road for regret.
I now seriously regret slamming a basketball as hard as I could off the carpet in my studio unit several times, which I did about a week and a half ago. Unbeknownst to me then, perhaps because I don’t know my own strength — kidding — that impromptu method of venting frustration can be quite costly. The real estate agent who works for my landlord assured me of that much, after I reported the damage.
In addition, I also deeply regret angrily venting frustration last week to a good friend I’ve known for a few years. I let negative emotion boil over. The friend said something, trying to be supportive, which I interpreted in an overly fatalistic way, leading me to respond inappropriately and inexcusably.
Ironically, the people we come to trust and care about are often the same people we can end up hurting or otherwise upsetting precisely because we feel comfortable sharing with them what we wouldn’t dare share with individuals we don’t have the same level of understanding with. It’s ironic that genuine friendship can create the conditions for its own potential implosion, especially if one of the friends gets too far out of pocket and tries to recklessly articulate hurt and pain in regrettable fashion.
In the aforementioned instance, regret begets more regret. I regret that I let frustrations mount so much they led to further regret, adversely affecting a friendship that’s meant (and means) a lot to me.
On a long and winding “highway of regret,” anguish I let accumulate kept propelling me in the wrong direction, making me miss my turn.
But if regretting serves a productive purpose, it could be that it elucidates what and who you value as well as what you need to be sure to not fuck up so mightily going forward.
I suppose you have to take it one day at a time, learning to not only live with regrets but also to practice living in ways that reduce the likelihood of doing or saying the regrettable. Best case scenario, that approach encourages the change within oneself needed to start righting wrongs.
“The winds of change are blowing wild and free,” to quote the rest of the apropos Dylan verse from above, “You ain’t seen nothing like me yet.”
Using regret to spur self-transformation perhaps represents a major turning point in life, a move from the old “highway of regret” to what Woody Guthrie, one of Dylan’s early musical influences, referred to in his most widely recognized song as “that freedom highway.” And the land to which it leads, as Guthrie might still have it, was made for us all to enjoy, provided we put in the effort to head in that direction.