My maternal grandmother once lamented that our family, having arrived in St. Augustine in 1832, did not purchase miles of beach-front property. “Such a missed opportunity,” she said. All of us, I imagine, can relate to missed opportunities. All of us can relate to standing on the sidelines only to regret our inaction at a later point.
Robert Fulton, an artist and engineer, was responsible in the early 1800s for putting sailing ships out of business. He made the steamboat a standard on the open seas. It is said that he presented his idea to Napoleon. After a few minutes of this presentation, Napoleon is reported to have said, “What, sir? You would make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I pray you excuse me. I have no time to listen to such nonsense.”
As a pastor, I am privy to stories of regret from people who missed out on adventure only to later bemoan the botched opportunity. The lost opportunities seem to always have a common question at their core: “Why didn’t I take the chance?”
An Arabian proverb given to me by a Rotarian friend is true: “Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.” All of us know that fumbled opportunities do not come back. Some of us live our lives lamenting a chance never taken. We look back upon something that we wish we would have done, but out of fear we played it safe. Perhaps we should all take advice from the Jewish Talmud, “Act while you can: while you have the chance, the means, and the strength.”
My experience suggests that we often regret with great pathos those things that we did not do but wished we had done. For example, a common regret — missed opportunity — is not traveling when you have the health to travel. After all, as the sun sets upon our lives we have but memories; these memories are often colored by seized opportunities or regrets of inaction.
It is fear that oftentimes keeps us from taking a chance. Fear of what might happen. Fear of the unknown. Fear of potential consequences. But if we exist too much by the dictates of fear we will live on the periphery of life. Fear governs strictly and is antithetical to a life well lived.
As each year passes into the next, the more convinced I become that Mark Twain was correct when he observed: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
