You’re on your seventh YouTube video and you haven’t even noticed; you’re too far gone. The Web has grabbed you by the hair and forced you into its never ending supply of cooking videos, Bee movie remakes, and dogs trying to climb down stairs. You figured you deserved some sort of treat. You’ve been hounding away at the "Business Statistics" textbook, ready to crush the final tomorrow. Rather accidentally, you glance at the time, and swear under your breath.

There you are, complaining about the semester again. The professors? Suck. The classes? Boring. But you’re having fun, making new friends, exploring parts of JMU, or, for some, experiencing it for the first time - but you can’t see any of that. You don’t appreciate what’s in front of you, and when it all ends, you sit back and think about all the "why’s" - why didn’t I take notice? Why didn’t I soak it all in when I could?

In an interview I watched, Andrew Garfield told someone that, “there’s something really very beautiful about regrets.” I paused the video right after and wrote that quote down, because in all my 18 years of living, I had never thought regretting was fun. All those moments when you hit yourself on the forehead, sitting in bed, replaying that cringe worthy memory isn’t really “beautiful” to me. Regretting is an indescribable sensation. It’s when you look at the time and it’s 4am on a Sunday. It’s when you forget to appreciate the times you had as a first or second year, and can never get those moments back. It’s when you screw up a relationship, drunkenly text an ex, or when you accidentally break a promise to someone important to you. What part of any of that sounds “beautiful?”

I resumed the video and heard the response from Amy Adams; “Yeah, it kinda is. ‘Cause you’ll never do it again.” Pause.

Regretting is a form of learning. It forces you to remember those moments that you would do over again, and that’s healthy. Using those situations to remind yourself to sleep before that next YouTube video, remembering promises better, or holding onto the ones you love most dearly can be, in a way, beautiful. However, when you think about that moment over-and-over again, regret loses its beauty and turns into something else, something noxious. It’s to be used cautiously, like medicine, taken as prescribed; once every so often. Regretting and dwelling on those last few days of senior year is not going to bring those days back, and it’s not utilizing regret for what it’s meant. Take the spoonful, swallow, move on and make yourself better.

So, as finals come up, keep in mind that not only is winter break, and all its festivities right around the corner, but take your regret accordingly. If those things don’t help, try watching “the Bee movie but the rest is in the description” to cheer you up.