Regretting things done and left undone

When writer Philip Caputo was almost 69, he took a road trip across the country—diagonally, from Florida to Alaska. The United States seems to be fracturing politically and socially, and Caputo wanted to ask people along the way what holds us together—what makes the pluribus unum? He wondered at first whether such a trip was madness. But “if I'd learned anything,” he writes in his recent book about the trip, “it was that the things you do never cause as much regret as the things you don't.”

I have some sympathy for this perspective. A few years ago I filled up several pages in my journal with regrets from my life. Mostly they were things I didn't do, rather than things I did. Many of them had to do with my shortcomings as a parent.

I have a college professor friend who says she doesn’t like the language of regret. She observes her students trying to do too many things, for fear they’ll regret not having done them. She prefers using the word only when she’s done something that is hurtful to other people.