I had lunch with some friends the other day, and one of them
stared talking about her past. She wishes things could have been different: a
happier childhood, a more caring family, different lovers, better jobs, etc.
etc. “What if, what if …” she wondered over and over. “If only this. If only
that.” Waaah, waaah, waaah!
I don’t resonate with that attitude, and “poor me” doesn’t cut
it, although I didn’t say so outright. Instead, an aphorism from John Greenleaf
Whittier came to mind, so I quoted it: “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the
saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”
This elicited a couple of “oohs” from the group, so after a
pause … for dramatic effect, of course … I explained myself, saying something
like: “I don’t regret the past, and there’s nothing I can do about it. It makes
us who we are. We shouldn’t dwell on it but should learn from our experiences and
move on.”
The Whittier quote comes from his poem “Maud Muller” about a
beautiful young woman who, while harvesting hay, meets a judge from the nearby
town. Each is smitten with the other, and each dreams of marrying and adopting
the other’s lifestyle. He dreamed of becoming a gentleman farmer, and she longed to become a
rich judge’s wife. In the end, with sublime irony, she marries a simple,
uneducated farmer and he marries a woman who loves him only for his money. Both
marriages are unhappy, and for the rest of their lives Maud and the judge
reflect with remorse on what might have been.
Whittier writes: “God pity them
both! And pity us all / Who vainly the dreams of youth recall.”
I think Whittier is saying that what makes it might have been the saddest of all
words is not merely that Maud’s life could have taken a different turn but that
she wastes so much emotional energy brooding over it. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. That’s an
emotion even less useful than worry. At least a few of the things we worry
about actually do happen. As for the
things that might have been: they never did and never will.
I reinforced my point by quoting a line from William
Faulkner. He famously wrote that for some people “the past is never dead; it’s
not even past.” That is to say, for those people—like for Maud Muller—the past
is a burden, old baggage, an albatross around their necks, and they’d be best
advised to shed it and move on. [It’s not often that I can work three literary
references into one short conversation—the third being the albatross from Coleridge’s
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—but
that day I did.]
As my cousin Doug Smith writes in his book Happiness: The Art of Living with Peace,
Confidence and Joy, “The past is a key to happiness ... because if we don’t
resolve feelings about events in our past we can be so absorbed by remorse or
anger that we fail to live in the present.”
Or as one might say more succinctly: Get over it!
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