The Wonder Years by Leslie Leyland Fields

Author:Leslie Leyland Fields
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kregel Publications
Published: 2018-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

Michelle Van Loon

Michelle is the author of several books, including Born to Wander: Recovering Our Pilgrim Identity. She is cofounder of theperennialgen.com for midlife women and men and a contributor to a number of other sites as well. Learn more about her work at michellevanloon.com.

The Gift of Regret

I officially entered midlife in a fast-food restaurant at the height of the lunchtime rush. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. One moment, I was eating an order of french fries; the next, without warning, I began to sob. It was not a dignified, gentle Jane Austen–heroine mist that could be staunched with a clean lace hankie, but a full-on blubber.

My three preteen kids sitting across the table from me could do nothing but inhale the rest of their burgers in awkward silence while simultaneously hoping that the ground would open up and swallow them alive so they wouldn’t have to die of embarrassment. The one saving grace of this moment was that the kids thought my tears were a result of a traumatic event that had happened in our living room a couple of hours earlier.

I didn’t have words to explain to them that the painful episode in question had almost instantly drained a decade-old well of sorrow buried inside of me, exposing a deep regret-polished boulder. I couldn’t ignore my regret any longer, nor could I rebury it. It was too big. My ugly cry in the restaurant was both a plea for a do-over in life and the dawning of my realization that there is no such thing.

Regret serves a training purpose in our lives. One of the first things a newborn discovers is that her cry creates a response from the world: warm milk, comforting arms, a dry diaper. This cause and effect teaches the baby how the world works. It doesn’t take long before a child graduates to some version of the old “the dog ate my homework” dodge to avoid uncomfortable short-term consequences.

As we move toward adulthood, we’re wired for idealism—dreaming big dreams, making big plans. The passion that fuels idealism also fuels the way in which we make decisions. Impulsiveness and a lack of experience with weighing long-term consequences mean we make decisions that may leave us with a collection of mismatched, unprocessed regrets. Because we’re very busy during those builder years of young adulthood—on the way to building relationships, families, and careers—we may not have the space to reflect on the consequences of those choices. But in those painful moments, hours before the fast-food oil hit my french fries, I learned that our loving God created that space in life for us. It’s called midlife.

There’s no way to get from the first half of life to the second except by moving through the crossroads of transition. In his book Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, author William Bridges describes transition as a three-part process. The first part is an ending that forces people to let go of some piece of their identity and the ways in which they engaged the world.

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