Congratulations. You’ve won the existential jackpot. You can redo any part of your life, repairing mistakes. On your mark, get set, go! 

                  Tempting, the thought. Memory collects misjudgments, misfortunes, omissions, faux-pas, idiocies on a lengthening list. So much I did I wish I hadn’t! Then the pause. Relieve me of my mistakes and you deprive me of the benefit I derived from them. Was I cruel, obtuse, oblivious, arrogant, careless? You bet! Thereafter did I repeat these infractions? Not exactly – new ones, rather. Am I better now than I was – penitent, even reformed? “There’s no bad road that leads to a good place” – isn’t that one of my bromides? So which chapter of my saga do I wish to rewrite?

                 “Mistakes,” wrote wise Lewis Thomas, “are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in life this way. We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.” 

                  But isn’t that too forgiving? What about guilt, compunction, remorse? Some goofs on my list make my blood run cold. How could I have!

                  I engage the firm of Woulda, Shoulda, and Coulda to defend me in moral bankruptcy court and they do not come cheap. While few of my misdeeds were unusual, they feel unforgivable. “I have sinned more than the number of the sands of the sea,” groaned bad king Manasseh. Or the tax collector in Jesus’ parable: “God be merciful to me a sinner.”

                  But to expunge that guilt, clean my slate? The calculus gets trickier, like three-dimensional checkers. My mistakes were unarguable. But a decade or five after? Am I better for having been battered? And is my world bettered by my amendment?

                  Guilt and imagination stroll hand in hand. The more one muses, the more one’s inclined to replay, revise. If only! Some inward brooding is analytic; too much, paralytic.

                  As I near my departure, I inch toward self-forgiveness. Did I do my best? Often not, I think, but maybe at the time that was my best, I only imagined I could do better. “I wasted time and now doth time waste me,” moans Shakespeare’s Richard II; but unless he’d wasted that time, he’d never have learned the horrifying cost of such neglect. Only by being bad, could Richard become good; so with many of Shakespeare’s heroes; so, we’re convinced, with their creator. His wounds became his wealth.

                  Lives are often judged like sports events: win or lose?  Or like business enterprises: success or failure? Such masochistic metaphors mislead. Each of us sets our life’s value: it is so if we think so. Did you, in Thoreau’s formulation, live “the life you imagine?” If so, what more can you ask? Henry James makes the same point in The Ambassadors (hard as it is to imagine these two Henrys singing the same tune): “Live all you can,” exhorts Strether in The Ambassadors, “it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?”

                  Regret clings like pine tar, almost impossible to rinse. But enough already. Revise your verdict on being by mending your mind. That is what I tell myself: think your way to Hallelujah, even if you’ve not been lofted there!

                  Sometimes it works.