If You Could've Done Better, You Would Have

We often want to help people with their regrets, by telling them: “If you could have done any better, you would have. The reason you didn’t, is that you were constrained by your trauma background, your history.”

They reply that this is a slippery slope; that if they allow themselves the solace of explaining their bad choices by invoking their past history, they might recklessly let themselves off the hook for all kinds of error—laziness, impulsivity, greed—in the present and the future.

But it is not a slippery slope, so long as we locate the determinism in the past, where it belongs, and the freedom in the present, where we need it. Both the past and the present are constrained by the effects of the remote past I call my childhood. But the past of my young adulthood is already fixed, whereas the present is still relatively fluid, with room for choice and decision.

What is the precise extent of today’s freedom? How far can I hope to excel my previous performances? How free am I this morning, to do better than before? The only way to find out is to do the best I can now do, and learn about the flaws in today’s efforts only in hindsight, later on. Only tomorrow’s perspective will reveal the hidden limits of today’s freedom. I can best reach those limits—I can make optimal use of today’s undefined opportunities—by living as if I were entirely free of the constraints my origins impose on me. I am now 55. For my twenties, therefore, this process is now complete, so I’m now free to conclude that at 25 I indeed did the very best I could do—even though some of my choices that year were relatively disastrous. Had I been more free, I would have done better.

This is not a moral framework; the goal is to understand, not to excuse. Understanding will give me the breathing room to choose how to handle the moral dimension of my past conduct, prioritizing compassion over punishment, wisdom over bitterness, edification over regret.

Every child experiences some particular mixture of three things: getting the good stuff (love), not getting the good stuff (neglect), and getting the bad stuff (misuse, or worse: abuse). The particular mixture supplied by a particular childhood has consequences—exerts constraints on our freedom of thought and action—for the whole lifetime. But those constraints can loosen and fade with experience, especially with enough good experience. At no point am I ever in a position to assess exactly how much my early years are still shaping my current actions and perceptions right now.

So: today, I will do the best I can, as if I were no longer limited by the consequences of my origins. Tomorrow will show me why I got as far today as I did, achieving no more and no less than my level of maturation could permit. The psychotherapy that helps me understand the tragedies of my young adulthood also equips me to improve my future, not only because it helps me learn from experience, but because it explains why I suffered from the particular ignorance that I did.

Today’s ignorance will be tomorrow’s knowledge. As I contemplate the ways I fell short in the past, the more compassion I can muster for my youthful self, the less regret I must endure today. From present contemplation of my past mistakes, I must learn both prudence in dealing with the outside world, and mercy in dealing with myself.

Of course my history limits my choices. But exactly how much? I don’t know, and that’s a good thing. Our ignorance of the precise nature and extent of our constraints is part of our freedom. And just as a temperate optimism can enhance my odds of success in the world outside, my inner life will likely go better if I let myself assume I have achieved more growth and healing than I can readily prove. “With every mistake,” wrote the Beatles, “we must surely be learning.” In the absence of an impossible certainty, we are better off trusting in the human spirit’s innate powers of development.

One way to have that experience, to grasp for that faith, is to “see” your elderly future self kindly smiling down on you from the future. You might as well… look.