"In youth our  judgements are obscured by our hopes; in age, by our regrets. - Paul Eldridge, 1965

We are so often filled with our regrets, which are but hope denied. When we think back on our regrets, what we are most bereaved of is the fact that we cannot have done differently. What makes a regret what it is, is that we wish we would have done different. Y We don't regret what happened to us, that we were Ina car accident, or that our pet died - rather is regret that we made the choices which we did. To regret a car accident is to wish that you had takes a different route that day, or that you had been able to switch the passenger and driver's sides. A regret does not have to be a specific choice that we did make, but can also be a choice that we wish we would have been able to make. 

To hope for something is to wish that it will come to pass. Unlike what you regret, that which you hope for may be something which you do, or which happens to you. We hope to win the lottery, or that our crush talks to us one day. We hope that we can graduate college, and that we can make a new friend today. 

Regrets and hopes both push us forward, and both drag us back. A regret pushes us forward when we remember what we failed to do, and resolve to do better next time; It can act as a goad. A regret drags us back when we wallow in our regret, and when we live a life concerned not with what we may do, but with what we  may have had. Mere memory of a regret, or unwillingness to let it go, does not drag us down. People need time to heal, and not all regrets are bitter - some are bittersweet. A hope pushes us forward when we try and reach for it, and a hope holds us back when we try to reach for it too hard, or always wait for it to come to us. The establishment of a hope in lif, e or the achievement of its success, more often than not, relies upon a massive amount of hard work and a tiny bit of luck. It most often fails to be realized when you only try the other way around. 

To say that our judgment is obscured is to say that either our judgements of the future, past, or present, result in a mistaken impression. An obscured judgment of the past leads us to think that we were something we were not, we deserve something which we do not, we were stopped in our achievements by something which did not stop us, or that what we achieved was the wrong thing. A judgment of the present which is obscured leads us to think that we cannot do something which we can, or that we can do something which we cannot. An obscuring judgment of the future leads us to think that something will probably happen which won't, won't happen which will, or should happen because of what did happen. The categories of these mistaken judgements come under the umbrella of fallacies, assumptions, and denials. 

In this sense, 'youth' and 'old age' are not actual markers of age, but are instead states of mind. Our judgments are almost always obscured by one thing or another, and the best knowledge we have of the future is always nothing but our best guess. Our knowledge of the past and the present most often influences not what we do, but what we think we are. Whereas knowledge of the past and present can affect our assumptions about the future, those assumptions can often be clarified by clearing up our judgments of the future, so that our mistaken judgments of the past and present don't have to strongly affect our judgments of the future. They still can, but this happens mostly in the way that they influence who we think we are. Are you a person who tries, who is worthy, who experienced love or success, or who was always the butt of jokes? We are more often limited not by what we can do or will do, but by who we think we are. In this sense, to be young is to hope to be something other than what you are, and to discover yourself. A man who lives with hope can be said to live in doubt - doubt that the world is all that is. A man who lives in regret can be said to live in belief - belief that the world cannot be changed. This is the opposite of what we usually think, that hope assumes success and regret denies success. 

Of course, youth and old age often have much to teach one another. Too much hope over throws the possibility of success, and too much regret dampens the possibilities of your life. When taken to an extreme, they become each other. Perhaps we should endeavor to become middle-aged, to have the flush of youth and the treachery of the old?


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