Regret


“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”

Søren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher


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Dear Kate,

"Life is short, so..."  How would you finish the thought?

I know a young lady who's getting ready for her wedding and hence now on this weird diet to give her the shape she wants but only for the day.  She said, "Life is short.  I am gonna eat what and how I want once the wedding is over, like there's no tomorrow!"  From what I heard in a month she will be on a mission to retire some of her vital organs prematurely.

I used to be somewhat like her.  Desire and fear go hand in hand; so the most popular topic next to food would be health.  To be totally at ease is to be always troubled by dis-ease.

Now I would finish off the "life-is-short" thought differently.

Life is too short; I must take good care of myself to soak up every brilliant moment of it.  "Too many good books; too short a life"--such is often my final utterance before bed.  I can't pray for God's "will be done on earth as it is in heaven" but don't care what the hell I am doing to my body and soul, desecrate the parts of God's good creation that are most intimate, his personal gifts to me.  I am free to live a good life and take in the portion of my daily bread with care and grace.

"That's all good," Kierkegaard replies, "but, Alex, didn't you hear what I said in today's quote?  That one way or another life will still be regrettable?"

I answered, "Well, Mr Great Philosopher--and I call you this for no reason other than that you truly deserve the name--this is the time I will need to take a step back and look at the fuller context of your saying, your short and often sorrowful life, the cultural landscape on which your genius grew, the same way one should read Ecclesiastes, the book in the Bible with more negative energy and existential angst than all of your magnificent outpourings added together, within the fuller context of the entire Christian canon, of the human experience, yours and mine."

Let me here share a paragraph from a great article on Kierkegaard's thought:

"The greatest enemy of Christianity, [Kierkegaard] argued, was 'Christendom'—the cultured and respectable Christianity of his day.  The tragedy of easy Christianity is that existence has ceased to be an adventure and a constant risk in the presence of God but has become a form of morality and a doctrinal system.  Its purpose is to simplify the matter of becoming a Christian.  This is just paganism, 'cheap' Christianity, with neither cost nor pain, Kierkegaard argued. It is like war games, in which armies move and there is a great deal of noise, but there is no real risk or pain—and no real victory.  Kierkegaard believed the church of his day was merely 'playing at Christianity.'"

To Kierkegaard, Christianity is an "existential condition," a way of life that accepts and assumes mankind's perpetual incomprehension of truth, and the climate in which a soul could begin to take its first breath is suffering.

Do you recognize such Christianity?  Is it the kind that your tradition practices?  If you see the Christ in Kierkegaard's Christianity walking on a street in your neighborhood, would you acknowledge him as your "saving Lord"?  Would you call out to him to make sense of life, your every regret?

But, really, one must be asking, then what sort of benefit is one to reap from such religion?  Going back to the thought of how "life is short," how should one finish off articulating its implication?  And how is this "Christianity" helpful in our articulating and living out of a benefited implication?

I don't think I can start to answer these questions, not least because they are framed in a way to dodge the real questions we should be asking ourselves, such as the one Kierkegaard asked in today's quote: "Why is life but a regret?"

Listen again, he didn't say "life is full of regrets"; he said life has a regret waiting for you anywhere you turn.  He was saying something as outrageous as in the first lines of Ecclesiastes, that "Everything is meaningless!"  Or as Eugene Peterson translated, "There’s nothing to anything—it’s all smoke."  All regrets.

Now our task is not to build a theology out of this or try to reconcile such extreme "negativity" with the more "hopeful" aspects of life or as spoken in other parts of the Bible or some sunny Sunday sermons.  That would be "cheap," Kierkegaard would say, "playing at Christianity."

Let's take a step back and consider what Kierkegaard really said.  It's actually quite simple, if we can be quite honest.

Listen to ourselves, especially our inner voice; what are we saying to ourselves, everyday, all the time?  That my life is not good enough and it has to do with my spouse, the one I have, the one I should have instead, and same with my friends, people I should learn or unlearn from, my career, the big break I am waiting for, the break I missed, the break that was unjustly denied of me, the land I am standing on, this goddamned no-good land where nothing grows, the many other good lands that I am not good enough for (and WHY?), the chance I should have taken to compensate for my no-good-ness and let luck work for me for once, the time I should have lived better, the other time I should have ended it all, the time I have wasted it all, the other time I should have wagered it all...

Kierkegaard would say a person who is speaking to herself in this "if-only" way is not serious about life, not ready to receive anything "beneficial" from anyone, not from the doctor or the psychologist, not from the cheerleader or the pallbearer, nor any Dicky or Dickens.  And the least from Jesus and a life in him.  The person is not honest enough about the bad news of her life to receive any Good News at all.

Life is too short to live muddleheadedly and halfheartedly.

Yours, Alex



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Dear Alex,

I have been staring statically at this barren screen for more than 1 h and 19 min. If I were to write more today, I may sound lucidly uneducated. Don’t write now and I will regret losing thoughts in pondering on the veracity of this quote derived implicitly from the last one you’ve chosen earlier this week. Think aloud and I will regret verifying my folly in public; think not and I will also regret living as an idiot.

A stranger to me, Kierkegaard, whose elastic breathing preceded mine by two centuries, lived in paradoxes even unto himself. He could have luxuriated in his family’s wealth and skimmed through life with princely ease. Instead, he chose the route of riskier resistance, confronting assumptions and illusions to the extent of writing in pseudonyms to contradict his claims. At age 27, he ended his engagement to then 17 year-old Regine Olsen whom he deeply loved, admitting he “could not make a girl happy”. Mocked by his contemporaries, he spurned the facade of Christianity devoid of cost and suffering and insisted truth be experienced personally: "Who I am? How did I come into this world? And if I am compelled to take part into where is the director? Where shall I turn to with my complaint?”

In the vapor of his 42-year living, he rarely left home in Copenhagen, insensibly genuine and fanatically rational in opening an inquiring berth for future thinkers and commoners: “My life is one great suffering, unknown and incomprehensible to all others.”

Suffering unknown. Incomprehensible. One to others. The words of Kierkegaard are transposing to my current experiences.

In the context of what-if, then-how and who-cares, the dilemma of selecting one regrettable choice among other options equally regrettable can paralyze our trust in self-competence. If I ignore Kierkegaard’s aphorism on a sunny Spring afternoon as now, I will regret it one day when the skies weep and the weeds creep over my creed of success. If I pretend to understand his words on the premise of rational abstraction, then I will surely forget about them by the next hour and regret my desertion of heart over mind in critical moments when faith breeds with futility. If my turning in any direction bemoans regret, what is the point of directing or avoiding turns that culminate to more regrets? Why bother anticipating regret at the onset?

Yet beauty, not pessimism, can be discovered in Kierkegaard’s observation about regret infused in the backbone of every backbreaking decision. To regret is to remember our vulnerability. Dust off the cobwebs and tenuous confidence to expose our fractured hearts and dreams. Plan A cannot liberate or fulfill me and neither can plan B or C. Through the maze I shall meander and accept my flawed outcomes at each curve or corner: hunting for joy but greeting sorrow, grasping on a safety net that strangles me, reaching for the summit with merely a steeper slope for descent to ground zero.

Perhaps this is why you and I are meeting here now between these lines - to resist resentment pervasively nuanced in our daily snorting and hauling; to laugh and lament altogether and individually at our multitudes of decisions, most of which will not impact an inch beyond our navel-gazing vision; to foresee our clutch at nothing in the end except for a vague recall of Kierkegaard’s counsel against living in the regret of having taken too few risks and too many warranties in our pitiful pursuit of paradise when the present is gifting us with joy inherent in pain.

Yours, Kate

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