Regret and dragon scale bookbinding

Photo by Magda Ehlers

Post 42

I was reading this article about regret. Here are a couple of quotes that stuck with me.

When people are young—say, in their 20s—they have roughly equal numbers of regrets of action (what they did) and regrets of inaction (what they didn’t do)… But as we age, as quickly as the 30s and certainly 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, the inaction regrets take over. Inaction regrets are, in general, about twice as prevalent as action regrets. As we get older, what really sticks with us are the regrets about what we didn’t do.

What I found are these four core regrets: foundation, boldness, moral and connection. Now, is one more prevalent? I don’t know, but the category that was biggest was connection regrets—“If only I’d reached out.”

In summary, we regret what we didn’t do. And one of the biggest regrets was over connection.

During the lockdown I reached out to people I lost touch with, including former co-workers. That’s when I found out that one of them died of pancreatic cancer, just 3 months before. That hit me hard. I really regretted not reaching out earlier. Now I have less hesitation in making contact with lost connections.

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In more uplifting news, I found this video about a guy who revived the lost art of dragon scale bookbinding. It’s incredibly beautiful.