No Regrets

Last night I had to make a quick stop at the store on the way home. As I was pulling out of the parking spot I happened to catch a quick glance at a bumper sticker on the car next to me. I thought of that most of the way home so later in the evening after a couple of hours of work I did a Google search and was able to find a copy of it. Here it is:

No Regrets. Am I destined to live a life of no regret? Regret is not only the dislike for an action committed, but also as the lack of action in a situation.

There is one time in my life so far that I can say is a true regret due to lack of action. It happened when I was taking my open water scuba dive to become certified. Here we were down in a murky lake in last October with very limited visibility. There were about 10 of us in the dive group including the instructor diving in and around a sunken school bus and airplane. As we were nearing the end of the day and the end of the dive, one of the guys in the group ran out of air. In his panic he reached out to grab hold of anything near him as lack of oxygen took hold. His eyes inside of his scuba mask bulging and unable to focus on anything as the instructor approached him with a spare mouth piece that would have given him the oxygen he so craved. In the confusion the panicked man grabbed onto the buckle of the weight belt around the instructors waist and opened it. The instructor immediately lost the ability to stay under water and popped to the surface as a bobber on a fishing line. The frantic man reached for anyone and anything trying to find just one breath.

As he approached me I backed away and swam to the surface. I did not try and help this man, I backed away. I did not hand him my spare mouth piece as I had been trained, I backed away. I let his panic effect the way I was thinking and backed away.

As I came to the surface, I looked around and watched as two others in our dive group brought the semi-conscious man to the surface. As he drew his first breath of air, he started to cough up the lake water he had swallowed in those last minutes of panic and slowly rolled onto his back in complete exhaustion. That man survived and I passed my dive exam.

Is there ever a life without any regrets? Probably not, but the key is what you do when you have a regret, you can either become loaded down with guilt and remorse or you can learn from the situation and grow. I have used what happened in 1982 to motivate me to be prepared for every situation and to manage my own fear and panic.
No regrets, at least no unresolved regrets that’s my destiny.