No Mistake Is the Final Word
One morning I looked around my apartment and thought about the fact that I was still renting. I was sixty-four, and I had been a renter for most of my life since my divorce. When I was married we had been fortunate enough to buy a townhouse. After the divorce I rented, and then I kept renting. More than thirty years passed. There had been opportunities to buy along the way. I had let every one of them go.
The thought was uncomfortable because there was nobody else I could ask to make those decisions for me now. I couldn’t go back and buy the home I hadn’t bought. I couldn’t recover thirty years of opportunities by finally recognizing they had existed.
The regret is not the renting
My regret is that I stopped deciding. Earning is only part of the financial decision. I also have to understand what I do with what I earn. I can work hard and still leave myself exposed if I never learn to save, plan, or evaluate the commitments I take on. That is painful to admit because effort is visible to me. I know when I have worked a hard week. I did not always know what the week was building.
No mistake is the final word. The next decision is. I can use what the old ones taught me when I decide what to do with the choices that remain.
What a man can do at sixty-four
Here is what I did, and what I would tell a friend to do. Stop treating the mistake as a verdict on who you are; it is a fact about what happened. Then gather one piece of real information about the decision in front of you now: what a payment would actually be, what the account actually holds, what the honest timeline is. Regret runs on vague numbers. Decisions run on real ones.
Write about one part of your life you are ready to leave behind and the future you would like to move toward. Choose a decision within that area and get the one fact you need to face it honestly. The years you lost are gone. The decision in front of you is not.
Keep Climbing Now: Nobody Builds the Tenth Floor First. Thirty-nine short chapters. Every one ends on the ground with something to do about it.