It’s early June: my thoughts always turn to an arrival in Polska. I wrote this last summer, after our return, and discovered only now that I had never posted it.
1
“Never regret anything, because at the time, it was exactly what you wanted.”
When I went to vist the school in Lipnica in which I taught for seven years, the English teacher, a former student of mine, invited me to her English lesson. As she was taking roll, I wandered about the room, looking at how the relatively new Foreign Language Workshop had been decorated. I found a poster with English sayings, including one about regret that I couldn’t recall ever having heard.
“Never regret anything, because at the time, it was exactly what you wanted.”
“So true,” I thought initially. Further thought made me wonder, though: perhaps this quote takes a simplistic view of both desire and regret.
Desires don’t come from nowhere. They aren’t frivolous imps that leap into our head, unbidden, unwanted. They arise, consciously or unconsciously, from our values, habits, and worldview. As a Catholic, I have to view some of these desires as sinful, as inherently evil. They are temptations, and I am called to overcome those temptations. If I choose not to, I’ve betrayed God, myself, and to some degree or another, my fellow humans. (After all, the Confiteor we Catholics all recite at the beginning of Mass includes this notion: “I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault; therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.” Emphasis added.) So if these desires are temptations to sin, and I give in to these temptations, and later I want to repent, how can I possibly not regret them? True, these actions were exactly what I wanted at the time, but that was because I don’t yet have a perfectly formed conscience. Further, if I don’t truly regret the sin, how can I confess the sin?
Yet not all desires are sinful desires, and yet we still end up wishing we had made different choices. Is this regret? I suppose. Is it the same kind of regret discussed above? Somehow, it seems different. Perhaps, then, we need to differentiate, look at some synonyms:
apologize, be disturbed, be sorry for, bemoan, bewail, cry over, cry over spilled milk, deplore, deprecate, disapprove, feel remorse, feel sorry, feel uneasy, grieve, have compunctions, have qualms, kick oneself, lament, look back, miss, moan, mourn, repent, repine, rue, weep, weep over
“Regret” seems the correct term for the theological notion associated with sin and forgiveness, as do deplore, lament, and grieve. For the second, less theological (and in some senses, then, less important or significant emotion), miss, feel sorry, or even rue seem appropriate. Working with those differentiations, I regret some of the sinful choices I’ve made in the past, which means I wish not to repeat them; I rue some of the poor decisions I made in the past, which means to me not so much that I wouldn’t make the same choice but that I dislike some of the consequences that came with that choice. I rued having left Poland, so I went back.
I think early in my life, I confused those two forms of regret, as do many people, I think, and that confusion as the source of the quote got me thinking of all this. In my case, I disavowed the existence of theological regret, and I overemphasized the things I rued.
2
Every time we come to Poland, we repeat: Krakow, Zakopane, even the outdoor museum in Zubrzyca (though this year, it was part of a class trip with L). This repetition is understandable in large measure because much of the repetition comes from meeting with friends and family. Yet it doesn’t change the fact that very little changes in our visits to Poland.
It occurred to me, though, the other night that part of it might be an unconscious unwillingness to move outside of a certain comfort zone in Poland. Yet that seems simplistic: it’s not as if I don’t know my way around the country and culture; it’s not as if I’m fearful of new situations here. I speak the language with passable proficiency: there are few times that I feel unable to express myself, and I even managed to talk myself out of trouble a time or two.
Yet as I wandered about the fields of Lipnica, with views I know almost better than the area in which I grew up, I wondered if it might be something else, something that I hadn’t experienced in literally years but which I knew all too well earlier in life, and multiple times at that. It struck most forcefully in 1999, when I left Poland for the first time and soon found I was desperate to return to Poland. It wasn’t that I wanted to return to the place as much as I wanted to return to that part of my life, to relive it in a sense. Returning for a short visit in the summer of 2000, I found a line from a song running through my head constantly, for I wanted to “hold on to these moments as they pass.” And so it occurred to me one evening this summer in Poland that I do the same thing every visit, revisiting places in order to relive the past, if only for a brief moment. Then that moment passes, we all move on, temporally and physically, and I find myself later reliving the relived moment again, only in my mind.
And so I find comfort in the places that haven’t changed much over the years. The exterior of the teachers’ housing block in Lipnica, for example, hasn’t really changed a bit since I first arrived in 1996. There are new windows; there is a new flue for the oil furnace in the basement; there are a few more cables strung across the facade. Other than that, though, it looks identical. It gives the illusion that, while the rest of the world has moved on, I’ve stayed the same, which is a ridiculous notion. But for a brief moment, it’s comforting.
Why?
Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man can’t be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
Milan Kundera
The easy answer is that it’s a vain attempt to deny my own mortality to myself, the stuff ironically both of melodrama and of great literature. And while there might be some element of unconscious truth to that, I don’t feel I really fear death or even give it much of a thought at all. Occasionally in the last few months I’ve surprised myself with the realization that I’m now in my forties, but this is not a mid-life crisis but a how-time-has-slipped-by-so-quickly crisis. And besides, this doesn’t explain the same longing I felt — only much, much more intensely — in 1999 and 2000 that led to my return to Poland. Surely I wasn’t fretting about my mortality in my mid- to late-twenties. Only nineteenth-century poets do that.
The longing, in fact, was much simpler (and significantly more naive) than that. It arose from the fear that the past was better than the present, and worse still, that the past was likely better than the future. A bit melodramatic, I’m sure, but those were the worries and concerns I had at times. It explains a lot of the angst I experienced when younger.
I no longer feel that way at all, though. Children make it impossible to look backward with the same longing. Children make it impossible to think the past was better than the future. Children make it impossible to regret the passing of time. Hence, as I wandered the fields of Lipnica, that strange longing to return to the past, while present, was only so strong as for me to notice its relative absence in recent years.
Re-reading Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, though, I discovered a forgotten quote that had so struck me the first time I read it that I made not of it on the slip of paper I’d slid into the back of the book and discovered as I opened it anew a few days ago. “Happiness is the longing for repetition.” Perhaps I’ve had it wrong: perhaps this repetition is simple happiness?
Children understand this simple truth: it’s why they can say or do the same thing over and over and over and over and still find it just as funny and enjoyable the tenth time as it was the first. It’s why they can swing — the ultimate in repetitive activities — for hours on end and still do the same tomorrow.
Religions understand this simple truth: it’s why all religions have ritual calendars, calling for the repetition of rituals throughout the year for all eternity.