A wise man once told me,

Don’t regret completing things.
Don’t fear changing things.
That’s not contradictory advice.
It’s advice about timing.

The meaning of these words did not fully reveal itself when I first read them. As I’ve considered the meaning of these words, I’ve found lessons from several angles and combinations. At risk of over-analyzing these words, let’s take them first, line by line.

Don’t regret completing things.

No regrets.

I’m not sure exactly how I feel about this line. What exactly is complete? Is completion when I’ve met someone else’s criteria for doneness or is completion when I’m finished, when I walk away? If it’s when I walk away, then completion is a given and it boils down to: regret nothing, have no regrets. If it’s when I’ve met someone else’s criteria for completion, then I need to actually exercise the idea of having no regrets. If I’m done but someone else thinks I’m not, and I stay for them, have I nothing to regret? I’m asking as much from reason, from the objective, given the virtue of selfishness as possible.

I believe from the subject’s perspective, effectively, when the subject decides some object is done, it is done, finished, complete. This is something I expect the wise man knew and this is why I have come to this final conclusion for the first line. When you are finally finished, when you have walked away, your work is done, the thing is complete, and there is nothing to regret. Additionally, any time you spent under the delusion that you were done but someone else had not released you, you are confused – you had not completed the thing. You are not truly done until you have acted as such and in any such case you should act without regret.

Don’t fear changing things.

No fear.

As with the previous line, I believe this boils down to: no fear, have no fear, fear nothing. Any action we take changes something. It is our conscious efforted change that we fear, that we may act and feel responsible for some change that will not yield the results we had predicted or intended. This fear can be petrifying, freezing us in place, preventing us from taking action, a risk to potentially improve our situation, to change things for the better. This leaves me with a question I’ve been fighting with for years – when can we possibly know that we should act to move towards the unknown? How can we ever evaluate our present situation against that of an unknown alternative? This is the conundrum of an academic purist, of the relentlessly reasonable, of the risk-adverse. While in many arenas, I can be seen as a wild risk taker, a cultural deviant, a creative eccentric and thrill seeker – in others, in questions effecting my sturdy foundation, the platform from which I launch my wild schemes, the core of my sense of safety and willingness to take risks in other areas, I consider myself reasonable to a fault, painfully conservative, detrimentally risk-adverse.

That’s not contradictory advice.

Advice to not regret completing things and not fear changing things can sound contradictory. Advice to not regret completing things essentially says – complete things. Advice to not fear changing things essentially says – change things. This is why it can sound contradictory. The wise man’s explanation for why it is not contradictory comes in the last line.

It’s advice about timing.

Time and a place.

This blockquote is a popular colloquialism for a quote relating to this last line most readily in its following meaning. There is an appropriate time for things or order of events. In this case, the suggestion is to complete something before changing it. When we’ve decided that something needs to change and we are no longer fearful of taking action, it may be appropriate to complete some thing and not regret it.

This suggests that my original interpretation that perhaps completion is whenever we so choose, was not the intended message of the wise man. In this case, the suggestion appears to reveal the following logic and steps. If something should change, proceed as follows:

How To Make A Change

1. Overcome fear of change.
2. Commit to making a change.
3. Finish what you started before making the change.
4. Do not regret delaying the change to finish what you started.

Conclusion

This concludes my interpretation. I find myself unconvinced and still intrigued. I will see if I can’t track down this wise man for insight into this subject and the meaning of his words. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your interpretations or related advice.

Time may change me,
Geoff