Although I ended up working several hours on my Sabbath yesterday, it was not until late afternoon. Both my pastor's message in the church service that I attended and the guests on "Super Soul Sunday" (OWN) provided me with much material for reflection. Yesterday I wrote about the pastor's message which led me to decide that I really want a soft and open heart again.
Today, I'd like to share from one segment of "Super Soul Sunday." Rabbi Irwin Kula was the guest "expert" with several guests, each of whom was dealing with significant guilt. Kula, co-author of
Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, talked about guilt getting us stuck and the value of forgiving ourselves. When we wallow in our guilt, it is usually because we obsess on replaying the thing for which we feel guilty, attempting to replay the circumstances over and over again with "What ifs?"
One of the wisest things that he said is that in order to move beyond our guilt that we must redirect the "What ifs?" into "What now?" or "What next?" His words really got me thinking. "What-iffing" is destined to frustrate us repeatedly because there can never be a satisfactory outcome. No matter how many ways we replay the past, there is no way to change it; there can never be reality in any of the alternatives that we imagine. The past is the past, and nothing can really change it. The only place to make change is now.
Mostly, I've lived my life without regrets but there are three things that really bug me. I have been guilty of what-iffing...for years, even decades...thinking that if I imagined the perfect combination of events that somehow, like magic, I would be transported in time back to the event for a do-over. There are no do-overs. Yet over and again, I've been unable to pull myself out of the do-over mentality.
In each case, I did the very best I could do with what I knew at the time. No matter how many more resources I have now or how much more I know, it doesn't matter. Although it seems like I've spent lots of time grieving, I may need some more conscious grieving. But, my real work now is to focus on the "What now?" and "What next?" The time has come for forgiving myself, so that I may move forward.
I've often said that the biggest regret in my life is my inability or lack of resources to have saved my marriage and to have hurt the person I loved most in the world (still do) in the process. I have grown a lot. Now I can actually see what I could have done differently, but I couldn't learn that without having been where I've been in the last 20 years. Not only are there no do-overs, but if we could, we couldn't employ resources that we didn't have at the time.
While that is clearly my biggest regret, as I've reflected over the last 28 hours, I think I have much more guilt over the failure of my business. Actually, it isn't the failure of my business that has caused the guilt, but what happened because of it. Many people think that the best entrepreneurs are those who have had at least one business failure. One of my clients--a multi-millionaire in the hundreds of millions--had experienced several business failures, along with his several huge successes.
Knowing this, I don't beat myself up too much about an economy that went bust at the time current events cut deeply into another revenue stream and just as my publishing house closed the part of the business which published two of my books. I had been very prudent about having multiple revenue streams and months of retained earnings to carry me over the bumps. Mostly, I just shrug about that: there really was nothing I could have done to change those circumstances that I hadn't already done.
What makes me ache about my business failure is that when I lost everything, I lost a small nest egg that my father had left me. My father worked very hard to provide for his family and to send me to college. I can remember many long days in even longer weeks of doing pretty physical labor. Quite frankly, I don't know how he did it. My parents were frugal and good savers. The owned everything outright with no debt. All that hard work and frugality allowed me to start my business and take time to write three books in the first place. I am truly grateful for those opportunities, and at the same time, it makes me ache that all my father's hard work just evaporated.
I have serious guilt about losing that money. In my "what ifs?" about this, I've even imagine having a conversation with him, hoping that somehow if he understood it, I'd feel better. The truth is that I don't think he would ever understand it. He wouldn't blame me, but I am sure he would have a very difficult time understanding me being entrepreneurial instead of working at a more conventional job. "What-iffing?" will never change that.
Finally, I've ended up later in my career in a dead-end job that has been financially devastating to me in the wake of my business failure. I took a huge pay cut to take a job that I thought would allow me more upward mobility, as well as the opportunity to sleep in my own bed on weeknights. That was just as the Federal government went into a three-year pay freeze, and now that we've gotten a whopping 1% increase when local cost of living has gone up way more than that, I've netted enough each pay period to buy a latte at Starbucks...if I don't buy a vente. To add insult to injury, the work environment has been toxic. Water under the bridge. I made the move. It is good resume material, and I have gotten to sleep in my own bed every work night since I took the job...until tomorrow. (A sign?)
The time has come for me to grieve my losses and move on. The past is the past. Populated by ghosts, it isn't a good place to live. I even think it may have had something to do with the hardening of my heart about which I wrote yesterday. Yet, I don't want to be glib about this. I plan to set aside a time for a grieving ritual, and then, I think, literally plant some seeds to remind me that, when I plant for the future, something can actually grow.
Rabbi Kula said that forgiving is not forgetting. I believe that forgiving is how we free ourselves. I've written in the blog before about forgiving others. Now it's time to forgive myself.
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