"We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment." - Jim Rohn
Saturn retrograde 2020 starts on May 11 at 1° Aquarius and ends on September 29 at 25° Capricorn.
The Saturn Energy holds our karma, struggles and challenges for this life cycle. This Saturn Retrograde provides the opportunity for us to let go of our regrets. Regretting the past is something that we all know we shouldn't do – and that we all know is pointless – and yet we all still have the tendency to do it. Unfortunately, making mistakes is something that is largely out of our control. We are programmed to learn from our mistakes because in the wild it would have helped us to avoid making similar mistakes in future. We regret touching fire pretty much as soon as we try it, and thus we are very unlikely to the same thing twice. But in our evolutionary history our mistakes had a tendency to be much more clear cut and avoidable in future. The mistakes we make today tend to be more complicated and dwelling on them tends to be useless.
There are two types of regret: commission and omission. Regrets of commission are regrets about things you did, while regrets of omission are regrets about things you did not do. An example of commission, you could have made a mistake in your career once. Maybe you lost an important document which lost the company thousands, and that led to you being demoted. This mistake can't 'undo' and you knew were wrong at the time – no future victory is going to erase that as it continues playing over and over again in your head until you go mad. An example of omission, let's take that guy or girl you liked ten years ago for instance. They were giving clear hints of interest and wanted you to make a move, but you were too shy. You've moved on since then and you're happily in a new relationship, but it doesn't stop you from regretting that past mistake.
Nevertheless, we then to regret the things we don't do for longer and in fact those regrets tend never to heal. This seems like a clear message to 'grab life by the horns' as it were and to 'do more stuff', but again it's probably a little more complicated than that. The chances you didn't take tend to be easier to rectify than those you did. 'That which has been done, cannot be undone', and yet 'that which is not done may yet be done'. In other words, if you're regretting not doing something still... then an obvious solution is to simply do it now.
Let’s consider the whole concept of 'paths not taken' is one that is somewhat arbitrary at best. The reason we regret the things we don't do most is because we never find out the outcome of what could have been. We have an idealized version of how those things would have turned out in our heads so we regret not living that possible reality. Meanwhile the things we did do we got to experience them in real time – thus they tend to be considerably less interesting. Let's say you always wanted to move to another city, state or even country. You choose not to because you are afraid, you don't have the money, you think it's unwise etc. and thus you spend the rest of your years wondering what it would have been like and regretting your decision not to. You may have done many other miraculous things your life – whether that's getting married and having children, being there to support your family or winning the Nobel Peace Prize... the problem is that you know what that was like and it was imperfect. Thus the 'undone' things always seem more interesting. Likewise the mistakes you make you live through and so you decide they could never have been that bad.
What you also must realize is that you do have to turn down some of what life has to offer. Very often in order to experience one thing we must turn down something else. There are billions of options open to you every single second and yet you will always just choose one of them. That's an infinite undone-to-done ratio. This might sound depressing – as though you'll never be happy with what you decide – and it's very much a case of 'the grass is always greener'. But in reality what I'm saying is that the grass always seems greener on the other side. It's not, and what you've done is probably perfectly remarkable and worthwhile in its own right: you just have to learn to see that.
If you can reframe the way you look at your roads 'untaken' then, you might find that you can overcome that feeling of regret. But would they fade over time as time went on even if you never managed this. our regrets won't completely fade – and particularly when they're related to things we didn't do. Consider past mistakes like carvings in a tree. They don't grow with the tree – they don't even get higher. Nor do they tend to fade and in fact in some cases they can get darker. However, while the marks don't change, the tree does and over time it grows to become significantly huger leaving the marks as a relative 'dot' in the bark. In other words, the carving that once took up a big proportion of the tree is now just a tiny mark on a huge tree – just a very small part of that tree's history. Your mistakes are similar. They might not go away, but as you build on them and have more experiences you will find that you can bury them. They're a part of who you are and actually you shouldn't want that any other way – however they are an increasingly insignificant part of who you are. The key is to accept them and grow anyway.
Music Prescription:
Arianna Grande - I can't quit you..