My biggest childhood regret is that I never learned how to cartwheel properly. My legs never go straight over me and I end up in a heap at the end, as I don’t land on my feet again. Not that I’ve tried in years. Why didn’t I learn to cartwheel? Lots of my friends at school could and spent most of their lunchtimes doing them. I chose to do other things. Climbing trees, playing on the concrete pipes, running round, pretending to be horses. But it’s the cartwheeling that sticks in my mind.
If I could go back, would I change it? I’m not sure. I’d rather focus on what I can do now. I have no desire to learn now. I’m not interested in turning upside down. Regrets are something you learn to live with. Somehow, over time my ability to cartwheel, or not, has started preying on my mind. It’s a symbol of all the things I didn’t do in my childhood. All the opportunities I never took as I grew older.
I hope that I can learn from this and take what opportunities come my way. What childhood regrets do you have, and how have they inspired you?
What I find most interesting–and human–in this revelation is that with all the things you could do and were successful at in childhood, it was the lack of cartwheel ability (which I share) that kept nagging at you back then. A real human trait–that we tend to focus on a negative while dismissing the positives as “not that relevant.” Glad to hear you have let it go. Now, the trick in life is to do the same for current negatives that nag at us. They will probably look just as irrelevant in ten years time as our cartwheel difficulties do now.
Actually I think it nags at me more now than it did then! Then there was always the possibility that I’d learn in the future, whereas now I know that’s incredibly unlikely.