Starlight, starbright

A couple weeks ago, I was tagged by Crushed by Ingsoc for a meme. For some reason, I thought this meme was about wishes, and spent my commute home today contemplating the topic. I just returned to the original post, and it turns out it was about dreams, not wishes. Whoops.
However, I'm not going to waste my valuable pondering time, so I'm just going to cover my ears ("la la la, I can't hear you!") and continue on as though my thoughts on wishes are particularly relevant.

At first, I pondered beginning this post with a list of things wishes that are especially poignant for me this week. For example...

I wish that pickle jars were substantially lighter than they actually are.
I wish I could have faith that the truth will always prevail.
I wish that there was such thing as diet candy corn.

However, in thinking a little harder about the nature of wishes, I started to notice a trend in what I was wishing for (diet candy corn excluded), in that the bulk of my wishes seemed to fall into two primary categories.

The first of these is your typical "wish upon a star" type. These are the idealistic wishes about the future, the ones that flutter through your daydreams. They tend to be about love, success, riches, happiness, and the like.

I wish I was in the South Pacific right now.
I wish to still be in love when I am 75.
I wish that I could fastforward through the last few years of my PhD.
I wish that I could buy my parents that log cabin in the woods.

However, there seems to be a darker side to wishes. More often than not, it seems that the phrase "I wish..." is tied into the past, things people wish they hadn't said or done. Wishing is intrisically tied into the notion of regrets. With regrets then being connected to guilt.

I wish I hadn't been on holidays when my cat took his last breath.
I wish I started running when I was younger.
I wish I had taken more time off before starting grad school.
I wish my then unknown last goodbyes had been a little more profound.
I wish I had stood up for myself more in the past.

My case supervisor recently told me, in discussing how haunted some people become from their regrets, something that rings very true- It is a near human universal to regret spending too long doing something you shouldn't have. The only people without such regrets are those without insight onto their past.

There is something comforting in seeing regrets as more of a rite of passage, as lessons learned. After all, what one of us has not looked back on days, months, years too long spent in a bad relationship, and beat ourselves up for that time presumably wasted-- when, really, the fact that we will never find ourselves there again because of that time that was too much. Isn't that worth those extra years?

Living without regrets is a bad reality show catch phrase. Living through your regrets and learning from your regrets seems like something more realistic to wish for.