Regret.

Someone once told me that 'the biggest failure in life is to regret.'

Regret is the feeling that rubs salt the already open wounds of failure and tears open the healed wounds of the past. It calls to mind all of the past in harsh retrospection. All the questions that are drawn from it dwell on the ever elusive 'what-if' pondering a future that can never exist.

It is a feeling everyone wants to avoid simply because it is a feeling that teaches. It teaches you in the hardest way ever -- through pain. It can bring everything into perspective, and yet swallow you whole. The harder the life, the greater the multitude of regrets. Clearly, everyone tries to avoid it. People and their desire to live life with no regrets, to never look back and go about life free. They are a blind to their futures, living only for whatever situation presents itself before them and dealing with it in a superficial way. On the other hand, people consumed with regrets cannot see beyond their past and can neither make proper decisions.

Yet, we need regret, as we need all failures and for the same purpose that we need all failures. That is to learn. You cannot learn from success, human nature prevents it. Logically, a success in a certain situation will call the organism to repeat the actions when presented with a similar situation, thus conquering it all the same. Yet, humans, we are proud, and our successes we take for granted. And the more we succeed, the more proud we grow, the more lax we become in our processes, which will ultimately result in failure. On the other hand, failure teaches us what not to do in the future. It makes us analysis, reflect and consider the possible places we erred and so that we may end up fixing them. And when we do that, we are learning. Then we will succeed.

Likewise, regret is a failure that teaches, it reminds us of the learning.

Of course, the entire point of this intellectualization is to run away from the fact that I am deeply in regret all of my past. I'm having difficulty now applying for university because I was essentially a prick to my teachers in school. Irresponsibility and a callow attitude are but kind words to describe the way I behaved towards my teachers. Now no one wants to write me a testimonial, and with that lost are my dreams of applying to the UK.

Of course, I don't feel regret merely because I will not be studying in the Uk, that is small part. Upon retrospection of the way I acted in school, playing truant, coming late, being tardy in submissions, if they occured at all, giving attitude to some of my teachers. I feel horrible, because I didn't treat them with respect, my life didn't reflect the values I hold dear. I'm really sorry. I wished I'd had been a better student. Just thinking about all the good I could have done hurts.

I failed. I failed myself, I failed my teachers, most of all, I failed God. Thankfully, I learnt a lesson from all this. Harsh it may be, hopefully I'll it's fruits in the future. Hopefully, some good will come out of my wickednes.

"Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil." - St. Augustine