Making friends with yourselves

The relationship you have with yourself is fundamentally important, but the common notion of the “self” fails to recognise that we are more than one entity. To live a satisfying life, one must maintain healthy and accepting relationships among the many personalities we call the individual. The past, the future, and the present you are all fundamentally different people who share a common thread, and have different needs and desires.

The various tenses of our soul haunt or terrify us, or we block out their true nature by denial or wishful thinking. Being objective about the self is incredibly difficult, but we need to reconcile our true natures to set our various identities on the same course. In doing, so we build a powerful protagonist who weaves a fulfilling narrative in our lives.

Regret

It is generally considered wise to live a life without regrets. But how does one abandon regret? Like all emotions, regret performs a biological function to control and modulate our behaviour. Guilt and regret are emotional cousins: whilst guilt tempers our social behaviour, the spectre of regret serves to steer us away from future bad decisions by amplifying and reminding us of the consequences of our past.

In this light, regret appears to perform a noble function, and I would say it does indeed, but it also has an annoying habit of destroying our esteem and paralysing us from action. If we expect too much from ourselves, we live with constant regret and often stop trying altogether, which only leads to greater regret. It is reassuring to remember that life never goes exactly according to any plans we might try to make. Our attitude towards hiccups and mistakes is crucial, and if we see these bumps as opportunities to grow, then regret takes a backseat. Accepting that mistakes are an inevitable consequence of action also shifts your focus onto improving the way you do things – essentially performing the aim of regret without the suffering.