Not Ending Up Regretful
Mary Oliver said somewhere that “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” Of all the things on the list of what I’d grieve to have been: lazy, disinterested, incapable, arrogant, forgettable--maybe the worst is regretful.
I was in the Marine Corps JROTC when I was in high school. I signed up motivated by a feeling of scarcity I think: “There’s only one spot left” a friend told me, so we went together to the Colonel’s office, just to see. “You are interested in the Marine Corps?” said Colonel McHenry. “Yeah” I said, and a bomb of a voice came from the neckless man sitting to the Colonel’s left “YES SIR! YOU SAY YES SIR!” To say that Gunnery Sargent Estes shouted that command is to say too little about it; the command rose from within him, shoved from his lungs with the force of plate tectonics, but somehow effortlessly, like this is just the way he talks. “Yes Sir”, I said, because what else could I say. “We only have one more spot” said the Colonel. “I’ll take it, sir” I said, mostly because I thought that was the answer that would keep the Gunnery Sargent from exploding again. I could feel my friend turn his head slightly toward me, expressing disappointment that I spoke up first, “It was my idea to come in here” his look said. But I spoke up, and I got the spot. I found that I loved the Marine Corps Jr. ROTC; all of us high school kids, dressed up like Marines, marching in the same direction in our formation and in our souls I think, and for me at the time that felt like genuine camaraderie and direction.
And a regret that I still feel today, not as fresh as a decade ago, but still present enough, is that I didn’t become a Marine after high school. So I know Mary Oliver’s warning, I feel it regularly (I tried to join the Marines in the middle of my 30’s in grad school, but was told it was too late, I was too old), and I want to be open enough to learn from it. I do now, and I have for some time, felt the call to creative work, and I have now and then given it both power and time, but it has been dormant these last few years. I am feeling it rouse again, and so I am giving it power and time. I was going to say “trying to give it power and time”, but no, I am giving it power and time; I have the power to give it power, and I can choose to make time to give it time. And so I will. And so I am.
Creative work is a risk. Writing, painting, music-making, skyscraper-designing, business-launching all bear the risk of creative work. To put something out into the world for the good of both that thing and the world is to take on the risk of failure: the creative thing might not make the waves the creator had hoped. But more deeply than that, I feel the risk of creative work as a risk of my own self: to put a work out into the world is to put myself out into the world, vulnerable, unsafe, on the edge, unprotected. And maybe that’s why Mary Oliver calls this life the most regretful: the dilemma is that if I don’t give this work power and time I’m not being who I am, but as soon as I give it power and time, I risk who I am. So I have a choice: bear the regret of not being myself, or bear the risk of being myself. Those are the choices, there aren’t any other options.
And so anyway, all this to say that this is me, taking a risk, trying not to end up regretful.
Don’t hold me to this,
Jeremy
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