Missed opportunities…

I am full of regret… I am always full of regret, regret for having missed opportunities… or even worse for not having reaped the full potential of something… my abilities, a relationship with another person…

And I am particularly regretful of having missed a good picture, or at least a picture I consider worthwhile taking… like the other night when a friend of mine came around to my house… he was sitting on my roof terrace, the golden/orange light of the sun just before sunset was playing in his face… and suddenly his lovely dog was prancing at him… and bang! there it was: the perfect picture – the “decisive moment”… and I did not have a camera at hand and I missed this “perfect” picture… for days now I have this imaginary, forever lost, transient picture in my head… it would have been exactly the way to portray him and his dog – in my opinion, of course, others might disagree…

For days I have been walking around full of regret having missed this image… I find it very difficult to get this out of my mind …and to exacerbate regret… obviously I am also idealising the image in my mind… the brilliant Annie Leibovitz could not have thought of a better set-up… I am also still carrying around two missed images from my last visit in Kiev in my mind… and, of course, from other locations/destinations I have been lately…

It goes without saying that this is also a wider metaphor for the regret I feel when I miss – or seem to miss opportunities in my life… for all kinds of reasons: fear of not succeeding, lack of self confidence, apprehension of being rejected, this odd mixture of shyness and arrogance, and often also pure laziness, being too comfortable, not driving oneself enough…

This feeling of regret can paralyse you… but in some instances it can also be the driving force for improvement and working on yourself in order not to miss the next opportunities… I am hoping for the latter… And I am hoping that some “missed” opportunities will represent themselves again and I will be better at grasping them…