The lives we didn't live

The lives we didn't live They appear, sometimes, in the simplest moments. There are days when you sit down with a coffee and, without asking permission, that age-old question arises:

What would have happened if…?

If I had said yes.
If I had said no.
If only I had waited a little longer.
If only I had been brave enough.
If I had chosen another city, another person, another dream.

When regret sits at the table

Regrets are like that: they don't knock on the door, but they're felt all the same. No matter how many years pass, they return as gently as the steam rising from a freshly brewed cup. They are silent, persistent, intimate.

For a long time, we learned to see them as an emotional mistake, something best erased or denied. However, an analysis by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley proposes another perspective: regret is not a flaw, but a function. An internal compass that points to the places where something within us remains alive.

The lives we didn't live and the desire that persists

Other authors agree that clinging to certain regrets can become a form of emotional richness. Not out of painful nostalgia, but because behind that "what could have been" a desire still beats. A version of ourselves that existed at least as a possibility, and that still illuminates something.

That's why our deepest regrets don't usually stem from what we did wrong, but from what we didn't do. From what we left unfinished. From the call we didn't make, the door we didn't open, the phrase that got stuck in our throat.

Versions of ourselves that were left in suspense

Some time ago I reflected on this in a text that now feels like an untimely conversation with myself, about unspoken words. Looking at it now, I see that it was born from the same place as this coffee: from that silent region where all the lives we didn't live are kept.

Because no life is ever fully lived. There will always be a fork in the road we didn't take, a city we never explored, a love we let go, a job we didn't dare pursue, a future version of ourselves left unfinished, like an undeveloped photograph.

When repentance points the way

Perhaps that's why regrets surface when the house is quiet. They arrive when our defenses are down and remind us that we still have time to change things. All is not lost. Some decisions cannot be undone, but we can stop repeating them.

Sometimes, regret is simply a letter we didn't send. Other times, it's a path we can still take. And, in certain cases, it's a "no more" that also teaches us to choose better what comes next.

Perhaps the secret lies in this: accepting that the lives we haven't lived are not enemies, but signs. Signs of life, of desire, of memory. Signs that point—in their clumsy yet luminous way—toward where we still want to go.