Dear Octopus,
New Year's resolutions are practically an invitation for failure. I set a mere and trifling thirty of them last year, relishing the fearsome gusto with which I would tick them sequentially from the list as though they were items on a shopping list. How arrogant. How lacking in knowledge of myself. My performance in fact has been so miserable, so abject, that I have utterly failed to even remotely achieve one of them. Not. A. Single. One.
I regret that, and have thought about it since the chimes of midnight (and cheery tunes of the vaudevillian accordion belonging to the band of gypsies frequenting the freezing beer garden of my parents' local pub, where I saw in 2012). It got me thinking about something someone said to me that night. Taking a break from teaching the local teenagers the value of premium German spirits, I took a quick visit to the rat-infested lavatory laughably supposed to be a den of solace for the town's more miserly alcoholics and predatory homosexuals. A man next to me at the urinals quite freely and extensively urinated on his own shoe, then shrugged. 'That was unlucky,' I tried to venture, as if to reassure him that this wasn't the Absolutely Unmitigated Disaster that it surely would have been for me. 'No regrets,' he replied.
That phrase really, really bothers me. To have regrets, after all, is to care. To find oneself culpable for the mistakes you've made. People who say 'no regrets' seem to merely be saying that they find themselves incapable of wrongdoing. And that is arrogant, which is the worst of all human failings second only to unkindness.
The real reason it bothers me though, I suppose, is that I have a lot of them. A man urinates on and potentially ruins his own shoe (which admittedly appeared to be patent leather of the lowest quality) and doesn't regret it.....yet I regret the way in which I said 'after you' whilst holding the door open for him five minutes ago. I regret what I had for breakfast this morning. In fact I'd go so far as to say that I probably regret about 80% of all the decisions I've ever made in my life, at least a little bit. That's not to sound unnecessarily maudlin or melancholic just for the sake of a letter. The same is true (or should be true) for everyone really, to lesser or greater extents. I've met so may nice people, made so many interesting friends, and let them just slip away. I've been cruel and dismissive when I should have been fair, lied when I should have told the truth. Even in the last year, since the fabric of those flimsy resolutions was spun. There are so many things I should have done, but chose not because they were too hard, would have taken too long, or because I was too afraid.
This year then, it's just one resolution from me, with no frills or fancy. This year I will try to be a good person, and live without shame.
Easier said than done, I know. Give me strength.
Your loving friend,
Action Squid
