One of the things I love about my job is that I get to talk to people much older than myself, who have lived very full lives and are enjoying their retirement.
One of the things I ask them is, “Looking backward, what is something significant, that is very prominent in your mind, that you would do differently in your life?”
I ask this question because many people around my age fool themselves into thinking they are living life “without regrets”, and that everything they are doing and experiencing are lessons in shaping who they are. For some people this is possibly the best method of learning for them – through experience, trial and error. But I think it is necessary to recognise that this must be a slow way of doing things – making the same mistakes people have made in the past, and only repeating them yourself.
In recent times, probably the past three to four months, I am starting to learn more about myself, and what is natural for me to do in certain situations and circumstances. I am reflecting and looking backward and discovering the reasons for why I have made it to who I am today, and am starting to see some patterns. I have come to the realisation that for me, living life “without regrets” involves knowing myself, what action I would take that would be natural for me, executing it, and believing that because I have been true to myself, no matter what outcome I would have “no regrets”.
So an example of this. I asked this exact question to one of my patients who I have developed a relationship with, only after just two weeks of working.
If there was anything she would have done differently, it would have been the friends she chose. A rule she lives by is a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, “If someone betrays you once it is their fault, if someone betrays you twice it is your fault.” In this, she invariably meant that she had given people too many second chances in life, and had been hurt as a result. She believes that if she had cut these people out sooner, her life would have not only been a lot happier, but she would essentially have had more time to progress further in a positive direction.
So I had to ask the question, “How do you know if someone is the right person or the wrong person? If you have been betrayed that many times in the past, surely there has to be a pattern to the people you eventually clash with?” In my considerations of late regarding personality and intentions, I thought that these two factors must play a significant role in determining who will eventually consume you in a negative manner.
I have been pondering a theory about reducing the number of friends I have in my life. I told myself that I’d allow my expanded network of friends to increase over the next few years, but once I stabilised with the working life, that I’d reduce that dramatically. I think this process has already begun though.
In the past couple of days I’ve just decided to stop talking to everyone, and allowing them to initiate conversations with me. This is very unlike me as I have always been a big believer in trying to pick someone from a distance and going after them, for any potential, be it friendship, relationship, networking, anything. I think that people have taken advantage of that, as I know I initiate a lot and trust easily, and can reveal a lot about myself in a short space of time. This works in the short term, but I have found that things don’t last beyond a few years doing things this way.
I reasoned to myself lately that this must be because I see the potential in something very quickly, and since I’m not fond of wasting time, I therefore just cut to the chase. Unfortunately, as there are many people who enjoy chasing and playing the game by a certain set of social boundaries and rules, this does not work. People lose interest quickly – probably because they only have a superficial understanding of the world around them, and as I reveal a lot of my thought rapidly, they think they know me and probably want to take what they’ve learnt and move on.
Another concept I have heard of recently is Robin Dunbar’s Five Friendships. In essence, you can only have intimate relationships with five people at any one time, fifteen good friends, fifty friends, and one hundred and fifty acquaintances. This means that you cannot have more than this number of friends at any one time. Therefore, to make a new friend, you must remove someone.
I think during our unstable, younger years, we measure how good a friend we are by the number of friends we have. As we stablise and mature, we reduce the number of friends we have as quality becomes more important than quantity. In this way, if we are to make a new intimate friend, we must drop someone who has taken up 20% of our life, and replace them with someone else. This is dramatic.
Earlier than I thought, I’m just going to dry up my life. I’m fed up with immature people who I have put time into, who end up either misunderstanding me, or taking from me to selfishly benefit themself. I need to trust my first initial intuitions, I am hardly ever wrong about people in the long term, and giving second chances to people is messing with life.
In Buddhism, I know you are told to live for the present as life is impermanent – so make the most of now as things will never twice be the same. I feel like I’m living for the future now, but in many ways, I think it will make my present better.
