How to live without regret

A few months after I graduated from the University of Cambridge, I met a man who would change my life forever.

Today, I hope he will change yours.

We crossed paths on a Meditation and Hillwalking retreat at Dhanakosa Buddhist Centre in September 2011.

I don't remember his name, but I do remember the profound dignity of his sadness.

His wife had died and there was no escaping the regret he felt about spending most of his life focused on work.

He'd done everything he was supposed to, in order to be successful:

Built a stable career,

Secured their family home and financial wellbeing...

You know the list.

It meant he had little quality time to really appreciate his wife.

He planned to enjoy life together when he retired.

But life had other plans for him.

Her death and his retirement left a gaping hole where purpose used to dwell.

There was something utterly broken in his heart that still moves me today.

That brokenness was more of a question:

What has this all been for?

…and a tragic realisation, far too late, that he'd placed his attention on something close to, but not actually, love.

He worked long hours for his wife.

He dealt with huge amounts of stress for his wife.

But somehow, despite everything being conceptually for her...

He'd somehow missed being present with her.

She slipped through his fingers like sand.

Then he had to learn to live with feeling that somehow he'd got it all wrong,

and he could do absolutely nothing about it.

The painful lessons he learnt were a gift to me at 21 years old.

Just out of Cambridge, I was ambitious and determined to build a "big career" and "be someone".

But I was already exhausted and about to embark on my first cycle of burnout.

When I got home from that retreat, the anxiety I'd been battling would escalate into panic attacks.

Like many of alumni, I'd gone from being a top performer at my school to average (at best) in Cambridge.

Although I'd been relentlessly bullied as a "swot" and "Teachers Pet" between 8 and 16 years old, most of my positive sense of identity and self-worth were tied up in being a "high achiever with a lot of potential."

I lost that immediately when I became an undergrad.

I kept my first essay for a few years after I left and without a shred of meanness I can tell you I didn't have a clue how to write or think.

I used to sit at my desk in desperation, struggling to pull all the information I'd crammed over a couple of days into the shape of an argument.

As an Arts student, you can't even complain about your degree being hard because of all the comparison that goes on!

I got through the same way I'd managed to achieve the grades I needed to get in:

Work, work, work,

Fuelled by fear of disappointing the people I looked up to;

fear of failure and public humiliation;

and fear of being "stuck" for the rest of my life in the small town I grew up in, that was full of small minded people.

Whatever it took, whatever I had to sacrifice, I would make it through.

After finals, I threw up for the first time from extreme bloating in my stomach.

I've had symptoms like Irritable Bowel Syndrome ever since - it flares up when I'm stressed.

I had awful back and neck pain too.

When I went to an Osteopath, he asked me if I'd been a car accident.

I hadn't.

Apparently if you only chest-breathe due to anxiety for a long period, it pulls your body out of shape and can look like whiplash.

I wasn't fully conscious of it, but the man on the retreat taught me I could choose a different path from the one I was on:

Sacrificing my health and happiness in the relentless pursuit of traditional ideas of success.

I could place that question "What is this life really for?" at the heart of everything else,

instead of the things I thought would make me happy, but didn't:

like chasing after the approval of other people,

the nicest clothes I could buy,

and "ok" relationships that looked good on the outside, but left me feeling empty within.

I won't claim to have all the answers,

or that I don't get distracted just as he did.

But in the 13 years since we met, I've done my best to make his tragic story mean something more than his personal inescapable pain:

The death he experienced has taught me how to live.

I've never seen him again.

I don't know his name, whether he learnt to bear his regret....

or even if he's still alive.

But everything I have to offer you is given with deep gratitude to our encounter.