Judging the (Past) Content of My Character

I have a dream that my four little children will one day … be judged by … the content of their character. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have been thinking about regrets (again and again) and how I am fortunate to have so few now, largely because I am happy (enough) and do not want to change my present; but I did recently realize my regrets fall into two, sometimes overlapping, categories.

First I sometimes wish to have known 'then' what I know now, although this is usually because I want to have cleared the obstacles to what I have now more quickly and thereby have more of what I have now and to have been happier longer. This is not seeking to change the course of my history in any respect, it is seeking to be wiser and thereby have had a 'straighter' path. However these regrets do not bother me very much anymore because I believe I needed to make the mistakes I have made in order to value what I value today, finding worth in the things I find worth in today, be the person I am today who is (finally) happy with who he is. It may be true that we do not need to make mistakes in order to learn every little thing, but when it comes to life lessons, I feel certain there are some inevitable mistakes, some things we must learn by experience.

So it is that the regret (it is just one thing for me) still bothering me is when I feel I did not have the (moral) courage to have done something differently than I did before. While this category can be viewed as simply not 'knowing' something, i.e. the (moral) strength, or not having experientially learned something, i.e. the (moral) courage, and so making a mistake, I think this regret is different because it is not so much a regret of 'something done as the result of a choice' as it is a regret of 'a choice as the result of personal character'. Feeling guilty about what once was the content of one's character I think is slightly different than feeling guilty about a choice one once made - although they can obviously overlap.