Regret

According to the dictionary regret is a feeling of sadness when something happens or
doesn’t happen or doesn’t happen. But I prefer to look at it as a feeling of sadness which
occurs when one loses sight of his conviction. When loses faith in his reason for carrying out
a particular action he inevitably regrets it be it good or bad. A convicted criminal sentenced
to death will face the hangman’s noose if he believes in the reason for committing whatever
crime he was charged with. While a philanthropist who has spent his entire life “helping
others” will hang himself out of depression and regret if e loses sight of his reason for
helping people. As humans with free wills we live our lives according to our beliefs and we
only lose sight of them when they don’t hold true in every required scenario.
We regret when we the real outcome of an action differs from expected outcome in
an opposing manner. When we start a journey, a business etc we begin with an idea of
where we want to end up, we make decisions involving various variables, altering each as
best we can to give the best result, but when in the end the outcome opposes the expected
we regret. They decisions we’ve made along the way, if there had been a slight alteration in
any one variable will the outcome have been different? But the fact that it is too late to do
anything about it fuels the regret.
The pain that results from regrets, the feeling of wasted time and effort can cause a
nervous breakdown, the thought of what could have been disheartening. Most people who
regret started with the thought of doing something in a unique or different way, they alter
most of the regular variables hoping to get an outstanding new outcome but as humans we
can’t always know what awaits us on the roads we take through life. Even that apparently
awesome innovative idea could end in regret. I once read of cold fusiobn: nuclear fusion is a
high energy process that involves joining of light nuclei to form heavier ones with release of
large amounts of energy. It mainly occurs in stars and evolves large amounts of heat . the
advantage of this process over the already existing fission energy is that it produces more
energy at a cheaper rate with little or no radioactive waste product, although the high
amount of heat produced cannot be withstood by any known metal or metal alloy thus the
full power of the process has not been harnessed by humans. A couple of decades ago 2
scientist claimed to have achieved nuclear fusion at temperatures close to room
temperature, this was a revolutionary discovery which raised a lot of dust in the scientific
community, it was like the birth of a new industrial revolution like the world has never seen.
On further testing it was discovered that this revolutionary discovery was in fact untrue and
the results recorded were due to some anomalies in the laboratory. But since this event the
possibility of “cold fusion” has remained and some scientist still experiment and study the
feasibility of such a process. This got me thinking ; imagine these scientist spending their
lives in dedication to an idea which in the end was found to be infeasible, the regret, their
counterparts in other fields would probably have received Nobel prizes for their work while
the former die in obscurity. But the funny thing is, they still continue their research in this
uncertain field . what does this teach