The other day I was talking to a man who did very well in his career, who had accumulated a considerable amount of money and who lost almost all of it when bank shares collapsed. He didn’t let it get him down, he said, because his philosophy in living was to look forward, not back.

This set me thinking about the issue of regrets. Like everyone else, I have regrets that sometimes visit in the middle of the night when I should be sleeping. I have learned not to entertain them and to put my attention instead on the present moment, the experience of being in a warm bed with comfortable bedclothes, breathing in and out sleepily, and so on.

What really helps me though is my conviction that most of us, if we lived our lives again, would still wind up with certain regrets: things done or not done, said or not said.

Where else could I be?
This struck me one day when I noticed a shadowy thought scurrying across my mind. The thought said something like this: if I didn’t have to be here doing these ordinary things, I would be somewhere else doing magnificent things.

Er, hello? Magnificent things? I’ll tell you what I would be doing if I didn’t have to be here doing these ordinary things; I’d be somewhere else doing other ordinary things.

How long had I been telling myself that lie, I wondered? How long had it been lurking around there, gnawing away at my enjoyment of life like a rat beneath the floorboards?

The ideal self
I don’t know but it had a familiar feel to it. It had been generated, I think, by an insubstantial entity called the ideal self. I first heard about the ideal self from Brian Lennon, a gifted teacher of counsellors and teenagers.

The ideal self would have moved all its money into the post office just before bank shares began to fall. It would have known better than to have taken on that extra mortgage at the height of the boom. It would be the perfect partner to its spouse and the perfect parent to its children. It would get up at six every morning to run 10 miles before a breakfast of muesli imported directly from Switzerland. It would try harder in its career and would be a great success – and so on and so forth.

I think the ideal self is related to the existential notion that I am special. I am not going to get cancer, I am not going to die, I am not going to be in a car crash. These events happen to everyone else but not to me.

Pure fiction
Wherever it comes from, the ideal self is pure fiction. Ordinary human beings, in a fairly random world, haven’t a hope of ever becoming that ideal self. We can extend ourselves, do better, achieve things – but we do so as human beings subject to all the ills, weaknesses and misfortunes of humanity.

And will we have regrets? Of course. However, when they come, we can let them pass on by while we attend to the business of living in the present and the future.

Padraig O’Morain is a counsellor and his latest book, Light Mind, Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas.