Getting Older Didn’t Retire My Regrets

I was standing in the garage looking for a torque wrench I hadn’t touched in three months when it happened. Not the wrench. The other thing. A conversation from 1989 walked straight into my head, uninvited, full volume, and knocked the air out of the afternoon.

I won’t tell you what was said. It doesn’t matter for this. What matters is that I’m 62, I’ve done the work, I lift four days a week, I eat right, I sleep well, and none of that stopped a 37-year-old memory from showing up in a garage on a random afternoon and making my chest tight for twenty minutes.

You picture the stress of aging as a list before you get here. Joints. Money. Health scares. Losing people. That list is real; I’m not dismissing it. But there’s a second list underneath it that doesn’t get talked about nearly as much, and it doesn’t shrink with age. It just changes shape. That’s the list of things you did wrong, or think you did wrong, or wish you’d handled differently. Age doesn’t clear that list. It gives it more time to compound.

I anticipated the physical stressors. I watched my grandfather’s knees give out, watched him trade fishing for a recliner one season at a time, and I told myself I’d train hard enough that it wouldn’t happen to me. Ten years in the Navy teaches you that the body follows orders if you give it clear ones, and I’ve spent the last twelve years giving mine very clear orders. It’s mostly worked. I anticipated the money stress too, watched enough people my age get blindsided by a market downturn six months before they planned to stop working, and I built around that fear early.

What I didn’t anticipate was the regret. Not because I thought I’d led a spotless life. I’m not that delusional. I didn’t anticipate it because I assumed regret was something you processed and closed out, filed and done. That’s not how it works. Regret doesn’t file. It just goes quiet for a while and comes back when your guard is down, usually while you’re doing something completely unrelated, like looking for a torque wrench.

The surprise wasn’t that regret exists. The surprise was the range of it. Big regrets, the kind everyone expects, sit right where you’d think. Choices made in the Navy that I can’t relitigate now because orders were orders and that’s not up for debate thirty-five years later. Ways I wasn’t the husband I should have been in our early marriage, before I figured out that being right in an argument matters less than being kind in one. Those are the heavyweight regrets, and they show up on schedule, usually around anniversaries or when something in the world echoes them.

The ones that catch me off guard are smaller. A friend I stopped calling because life got busy, and by the time I noticed, too much time had passed to explain the gap, and then they were gone. A moment on the USS Iowa where I could have spoken up for a guy who was getting run over by a chief and I didn’t, because I was young and it wasn’t my fight and I told myself that was a good enough reason. It wasn’t. I still think about him sometimes, and I don’t even remember his last name anymore, which somehow makes it worse.

Age didn’t warn me these smaller regrets would carry weight. I thought weight was reserved for the big decisions. Turns out the small ones just take longer to show their full cost, and by the time they do, you’re too far removed to fix them.

I’ve tried a few things. Marcus Aurelius helps, more than I expected from a Roman emperor writing private notes to himself two thousand years ago. He wasn’t trying to erase regret. He was trying to keep it from running the show. There’s a discipline in that I respect, the idea that you examine the thing honestly, you extract what it’s actually trying to teach you, and then you refuse to let it control what you do next. I don’t always manage it. But knowing the goal helps more than pretending the feeling won’t show up at all.

My “faith”, for lack of a better word, does something similar from a different direction. Confession isn’t a magic trick that erases what happened. It doesn’t work that way. What it does is stop the memory from deciding my mood for the rest of the day. The regret is still there. It’s just not in charge.

Training helps in a way I didn’t expect when I started at fifty. There’s something about physical effort that pulls you fully into your body and out of the loop in your head. You can’t dwell on 1989 while you’re grinding through the last two reps of a set that’s actually testing you. For twenty minutes at a time, the weight room is the only place my brain shuts up about the past. It matters more than it sounds like it should. It’s also not permanent. The second I rack the bar, the loop can start right back up.

What hasn’t worked is trying to reason my way out of it. I’ve tried explaining to myself, clearly and logically, why a decision made at 26 doesn’t deserve this much rent-free space in my head at 62. The logic is airtight. It doesn’t move the feeling an inch. Regret isn’t a logic problem. Explaining it clearly doesn’t make it listen. You can prepare for it. You can build habits that soften the hit. But you can’t argue it out of existing.

The physical stressors have been more manageable than I feared, mostly because I did the work early. My joints are in better shape at 62 than a lot of guys I served with are at 45. My finances are steady because I stopped waiting for a perfect plan and started with an imperfect one at 50. So on the categories I braced for, I got some relief for the effort I put in.

But the regret category isn’t a fitness problem. You can’t deadlift your way out of a decision you made three decades ago. It doesn’t respond to protein intake or sleep hygiene. Having regrets this specific just means I’ve lived long enough to have a past worth looking back on. In a strange way, that’s a compliment to how long I’ve been around. You don’t get this particular kind of stress at 25. You have to earn it by staying alive long enough to see the whole shape of a choice, not just the part you could see when you made it.

I used to think the goal was to get to a point where the past stopped bothering me. I’ve stopped chasing that. The goal now is smaller and more honest: keep training the body, keep doing the work with the mind, and when the garage ambushes me with something from 1989, let it sit for twenty minutes and then get back to looking for the torque wrench. It’s still in there somewhere. So is the rest of it.