“How do you live a life with no regrets?”
That’s the question I hear most often at book signings. It’s a universal reaction to the subtitle. And it’s a question that plagued us almost from when we first became “a couple.”
As I see it there are two kinds of regret.
The first is the kind that comes when you do something and it turns out badly. You wish you hadn’t said what you said, or done what you did. That kind of regret stings — but at least you acted. You took the chance.
The second kind is quieter but far worse: it’s the regret that comes from hesitation — from letting the moment slip away. As Omar Khayyam wrote: “When Time lets slip a little perfect hour, O take it—for it will not come again.”. If you temporize you may never get another chance. And for me, for us, that was the worst kind. Jo and I had this unspoken pact that it was better to fail than not to try.
It was do or die between us. It felt as if before we met we had been living this shadow life, a black and white existence that was suddenly technicolor and we were determined not to let go of that.
As I wrote I realized how important that “no regrets” commitment had been to us. We had a mutual aversion to letting fear of failure stop us. It saw us through my bloody divorce, through taking on the responsibility of making the U.S. Open Polo Championship work in 1987 when we had zero marketing experience and opening one of the first medical spas in 2003. It was why our go-to answer was always yes—we’ll figure it out later. It gave Jo courage to become a world-renowned fashion buyer in 1998 and rode with us when we moved 900 miles away to start a new life in Santa Fe where we knew no one at an age when most people are picking out rocking chairs.
The subtitle came about somewhere in 2016 when we decided our best course of action was to close our world-famous medical spa at Hyatt in the desert. Cut our losses and move on We had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars because of corporate shenanigans and it was time to stop the bleeding.
We decided to write a book as a way to learn from our expensive experience and maybe pass on some lessons. We were going to call the book “Outtagas at the end of a Long Dirt Road” but it was Jo who came up with “Leaving Life with No Regrets” as a subtitle. It resonated with me, like a Zen kaon that changed meaning when you changed your perspective.
We shelved the book when we began to prepare for the Santa Fe adventure but it stayed on the computer and I resurrected that line for A Passionate Adventure. It was Jo’s line and I was not going to forget it. Or her.
At the end of the Preface I wrote: The true cost of not following your heart is having to spend the rest of your life wishing you had…
That’s regret. The toughest kind to live with. Thank Heaven we never did.
We never turned away from a challenge. Never. Held hands and jumped off into the unknown more times than I can count. Determined if all else failed we would have no regrets.
When I finished the book, put the final touches on the heart-shattering conclusion, I felt I had to write something about regret. Because I was still wrestling with that word.
I wrote an Afterword. And here’s how I ended that.
Life is a Shapeshifter, a metaphysical spreadsheet. You make a decision over here and all the little data cells blink and change and you look down at the bottom and somehow something you never expected to happen happens. The simplest decision can have the most shattering ramifications. The catch is you can’t see it until the end. If it turned out well you were brilliant. If it didn’t, you have to believe you made your decision based on the best information you had.
It’s true. You regret more what you didn’t do. By that measure we had little to regret. But if you’re a sentient being you will still be haunted by the why’s and the what-ifs. The further back you draw, however, the less important those regrets become and after a while you begin to think maybe, just maybe, that’s how it was all supposed to turn out. In retrospect we made as many bad decisions as good ones. Our only consolation came from not knowing what worse outcome our bad decision saved us from.
Who really knows? In the end we stumble along on a rough and uneven path illuminated only by a small circle of light. Beyond the light is impenetrable darkness.
That circle of light is love.
Gotta go…
