After almost 55 years as a reader, I have finally fallen in love with mystery stories. Not just any mysteries but a specific set: the novels by Louise Penny, which feature the Quebecois Inspector Armand Gamache.
I love Gamache not just because he is elegant and intelligent but also because he is a psychological detective. Penny's books are not about CSI-style science; they are about psychology and emotion.
What Inspector Gamache points at in each story are the choices made, over long periods, by the killer and the killed, and how those choices add up to lives and to deaths. Gamache asks, and makes us ask, what choices did this person make and hence: What choices am I making?
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Maybe as I approach my 60th birthday, the question of choices feels so important because the flip side of choice is, of course, regret.
We often think of regrets as mistakes, but they are not quite that. We are a culture of denying regret rather than accepting it as part of the human psyche. It's common to hear things like, "You should live so that you have no regrets."
We may even hum along with the tragic chanteuse Edith Piaf who sang, "Je ne regrette rien" —"I will have no regrets." But she was a drug addict and an alcoholic who died of cancer at 47. That would suggest a few regrets, non?
Living without regrets isn't possible. And maybe it isn't even desirable.
A new book, "Missing Out — In Praise of the Unlived Life" by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips presents this very provocative idea: We need regrets to shape a good life. Phillips suggests that we are always living two lives at once: The life we are truly, actually living and the one that we think should be or could have been. By staying aware of our regrets, we know the options we didn't choose. And that lets us clearly see the life we did choose.
Regrets, according to Phillips, are like the blacking on a mirror that allows us to see our reflection. Without regrets, we'd just fall through — our lives.
This does, I know, sound like something that would have been a turn-on in Intro To Philosophy back in the day, but maybe it's something that you have to be at least 50 years old to understand. Phillips is saying that we live in rowboats, always moving forward but always looking back, and that is as it should be.
Phillips' book is kind of existential but it makes sense viscerally when you read the daily news. Life changes fast. We understood this after 9/11, and again after the London bombings and again with the Indonesian tsunami. On a more intimate scale, we feel it anytime we read about someone who was driving to the store or to work and an oncoming driver was drunk or ill or distracted.
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A couple of years ago, my life had to change. I had always measured my life by my job, but suddenly I couldn't anymore. Someone asked, "But what about your career?" and I answered, being flip but surprising myself with the truth, "I don't have a career, I have a life."
That insight had incubated over time by too many funerals and too many days in intensive care waiting rooms. When my brother Larry was just weeks from death and we finally, awkwardly, got around to talking about that reality, I took a deep breath and asked, "Are you afraid to die?"
There was a long silence. Then he said quietly, "Di, all I ever did was work."
I love my work, too, but the day that I see the water receding too fast at the beach or hear the terrible screech of tires, or notice the cough that won't quit, I want to be more or less OK with my choices and with my regrets. If we live a conscious and examined life we should die with at least a few.
It takes strength and courage to accept our regrets and to find the middle ground between denial and self-justification. In that middle ground is our good life and true self.
The goal isn't to have no regrets; it's to be fully aware of them and what they represent. If we live a life with no regrets then we have taken no risks.
Diane Cameron is a Capital Region writer. Her email address is dcameron6@nycap.rr.com.