I find it troublesome that people sometimes make decisions purely in avoidance of regret. They plunge into new and murky waters with an ease I cannot seem to emulate, a spirited chase from hesitation that they always appear to be winning. But beyond the jealousy I have for the risk of the nameless uninhibited, there is something in the haphazard philosophy to which I cannot fully submit.

I have plenty of regrets of my own, of course. I regret I didn’t say something to the girl who left me a lingering smile in a San Francisco bakery, or that I never put enough effort into learning to play the French Horn. Sometimes I’ll hand a menu back to a waiter after I’ve ordered and regret my decision the moment I see a far better meal on a stranger’s plate. And I still buy t-shirts that look crisp and comfortable in a dressing room only to discover my regret six weeks and two washes later, when the cotton is ragged and the fit is too snug. At any moment, regret is bound to seep into me, no matter my strictest attempts to avoid such a hollow feeling.

For every thousand grocery clerks and pencil pushers who long to have grasped the courage to pick up a paintbrush, there are surely a few painters who, in relative obscurity, wish they would have kept to the simple guarantees of a 9 to 5 lifestyle. Regret is an inevitability—the hypothetical underside of the coin of the life we’ve chosen. So why do we spend our earlier years in pursuit of that which only now seems to leave the least regret?

The words of Robert Frost come to mind. His poem, “Reluctance” was published in A Boy’s Will, his first collection of poetry. The poem’s final stanza reads,

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

These words have bounced around my mind for some time now, often serving as a mantra to the flee of fear and regret. But little was changed by my remembering the supposed sin of hesitancy. Fifteen years after “Reluctance,” a more seasoned Frost wrote what some might consider a response to himself in the 1928 poem, “Acceptance,”

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in her breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from his nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night bee too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be.'

Something in this poem is devastating, like a pin to pop the balloon of his previous sentiment. But behind this realignment of boldness and wisdom is an essential truth to the latter work that perhaps dignifies the idea of regret into new idea altogether—something most of us, myself and the younger Frost included, acquire in piecemeal. Let regret be a well-mannered flame, serving to heat the future with the lessons of the heavily considered past. Weary is a life consumed with reticence to everything, but more so one that goes running from the inevitability of regret.