As a friend (my gay hairdresser, actually) is fond of saying, ‘If the horse is dead, get off the horse.’ The first time I heard it, I was feeling blue, but the image was so comically vivid that I burst out laughing. We were talking about past damaged relationships – as you do when you are lit up like a disco ball with silver foil in your freshly highlighted hair.
He rang me a week later. ‘Are you off the horse yet?’ ‘One leg over,’ I promised. ‘Not good enough,’ he said. ‘Pick up that pretty butt of yours (how much do we love gay men?) and get moving.’
To be honest, I’ve never had much time for regret, but these days I positively loathe it, perhaps because I’m old enough not to want to squander time on the past. I have the future to think about. I don’t think anybody, no matter what their age, should waste precious time on regret. It’s the most indigestible of emotions – like eating unripe peppers, it keeps repeating on you.
Years ago, I sat in front of a therapist, regretting a recent outburst of rage. ‘So what?’ he said. So what?
I was expecting a forensic analysis of my mother’s critical nature, my childhood terror of anger, the deep emotional damage that makes me so afraid of raised voices. I was expecting anything but that casual dismissal. ‘So, say you’re sorry and get on with your life,’ he said.
Is it that simple? Could it be that simple? Well, yes. Most people are happy with a heartfelt apology. Half the time they haven’t even noticed what you thought you had done wrong.
Our imaginations are so much more real than reality. Obviously, there are people who can’t accept an apology, but most often they’re theones sitting around on that
dead horse, the flies of self-righteousness buzzing around their heads. Nobody who’s stuck in resentment is going to budge an inch, let alone move on, so best to make our amends, however badly they are received, and get our pretty butts into the saddle.
I’m not suggesting we should all turn into sociopaths, laughing off wrongs and misdeeds without conscience, but conscience is very different from regret. Most often, we regret what we haven’t done, rather than what we have. When one door closes, another opens – it’s just that we might have to hang around in the corridor for a while waiting for that to happen. Dull as that might be, it’s better than banging your head against the closed door of the past. All that does is give you a headache.
Talking of which, I went to the pub with a group of friends and was sitting next to a man I had just met, who hates his job. Lordy, does he hate his job! He hates it so much, it seems to be the subject he most enjoys talking about, and a matter of great fascination to others. He should have done this, he would have done that. As Marlon Brando says in On The Waterfront, he could have been a contender. Instead of doing something about his present situation, even by taking one small step, he was stuck in the concrete of regret. In the end, I left. I don’t think he even noticed I had gone.
As I walked home, I thought of my hairdresser and vowed that the next time I saw him, my hair tinselled in silver, I’d tell him that not only did I get off the dead horse, I buried the corpse.
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