on discovering my personal mission, question 9

Life on Purpose: 15 Questions to Discover Your Personal Mission

Question 9: What would you regret not fully doing, being, or having in life?

Since I’m half way through my life, I don’t have to answer this question from some hypothetical future perspective, I can work with regrets I have already.

• Ending certain relationships. I think when we’re young, we have these fantasies about love and marriage and they just don’t materialize and it’s only from a vantage point of many years that we see just how good what we thought wasn’t good enough really was.
• Stopping running. Before I turned 22 years old, I’d run a 10:00 3K, a 17:17 5K and 35:30 10K. None of these are amazing or Olympic-qualifying times, but they’re really good times, and I guess I regret not keeping it up, becoming a marathoner. When I run anymore, I’m lucky if I manage 10 minute miles. Very sad.
• Not starting yoga earlier. I thought about yoga back in 1990, a time when I was young enough, and flexible enough, to have made a career of it. But I kept putting it off, and now, well, now it’s too late for anything other than a personal practice.
• Not parenting more mindfully from day 1. If I had put in the time when it mattered, it wouldn’t be so much work now.

But what does all this tell me? I can still have a life partner, and maybe I need to be more intentional about that, instead of operating on the assumption that it’s no longer possible. I can still run marathons, even if I’m unlikely to ever win one, and the truth is, I’m not a competitive person. Running might have become a source of income, but it didn’t, and won’t. Doesn’t mean I can’t have all the other benefits, still. Same goes for yoga. Sure, it would have been better to have started my practice when I could still do back bends and back walkovers. But I didn’t. Flexibility isn’t the goal of yoga. Union is. That’s still possible, maybe more possible starting from a place of humility. Parenting is one area I can still do things differently, starting today. If I regret today not having parented more mindfully from the beginning, imagine how much I’ll regret, ten years from now, not having turned things around when I had the chance.