Green Beans With A Side of Regrets

Regrets can make us feel heavy and leave lowered self-confidence.  How have they shaped your life? What if you could see them differently?

Can we learn from others as well as shift our way of looking at what lies behind the regrets?

As our time on this earth advances, so too can the number of regrets we may be accumulating.

Soft Regrets

Some may be soft regrets. Those where we wonder what could have been. Maybe someone reached out, but there was a misunderstanding of its intent.

These “what if” regrets are usually easier to resolve. We can reach out to the other who may also be wondering the same “what if.”

Hard Regrets

Other regrets can be harder.  These are the ones that stay with us the longest. Their deeper emotional imprint remains in us. If guilt is involved, it lies heavy, and resolution with healing may seem less likely.

Lesson-Sharing Regrets

And then, there are regrets holding unexpected life lessons for others.

Yes, every type of regret carries a lesson, but there are also those through which other people learn from.

Regrets - Alice’s Story With Green Beans

My paternal grandmother was a reserved woman. Whenever we visited her, she seemed in my childhood eyes to be on the outside looking into our lives through our chatter, but never connecting or participating.

Looking back on those years and her quietude, I feel increased gratitude for the rare glimpse into her thoughts. They were humorously triggered by an unusually bountiful year of green beans from my father’s small patch of garden located behind my grandmother’s home.

Even now, I’m unsure whether we loved them or canned and ate the bounty for the simple reason it was there. That garden had three years producing bushels upon bushels of sweet-smelling beans.  

My grandmother would have the bushels moved to her front porch and would start snapping off the tips and breaking each bean in the middle.  This was done with a nonstop rhythm until finished.

I was about eight when my mother suggested I help. “It will take half the time,” she said while handing me a large bowl for my lap into which my snaped, halved beans dropped. The unwanted tips went into another container on the porch floor.

And so, we would do this for hours in total silence except for one rare time. The final year of bean production before my grandmother passed away.

She spoke quietly out loud to herself, seemingly forgetting I was next to her.

She was wandering through her life; each child born and how many passed during childhood plus one beloved son in his twenties who passed from what was called “the plague.”

She recalled her grief over each and quietly wondered if she had pursued her dream to learn basic nursing, how many lives might have been saved. She hadn’t done enough living, she whispered and wondered who she would have become.

There was quiet grief over a lost love never returned from the war.

She was unaware of sharing her story to this silently listening granddaughter or the lifelong impact it made on me. I felt as well as heard the regrets of a woman born the end of the 1800’s, short on resources, and giving up on her dreams. She grieved for not knowing outcomes if she had taken a chance.

I continue to smell fresh green beans and hear her voice whenever I have a life direction choice that needs to be made.  There are few regrets no matter its outcome. I have and will continue to celebrate the opportunity to have possible choices from which to make a decision.  

We all gain from hearing many voices and stories. Below is a Comments section to share your experience and thoughts on Regrets.