# Welcoming the Pang

By [jer979](https://paragraph.com/@jer979-2) · 2025-06-23

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According to my nonagenarian father, it’s impossible to avoid regret in life.

What is possible, however, is to avoid allowing it to become toxic.

I suspect that regret toxicity comes from an unwillingness to acknowledge the pangs that come regret, thereby enabling them to fester and metastasize.

The alternative is understandably avoided.

It’s to allow, even welcome the pangs of regret, doing nothing other than feeling them, observing them, and acknowledging them, the same way one might when a thunderstorm is raging outside of the walls of your home.

I had this experience at 1am the other night. I was overcome by some emotional pangs, the result of a thought-trigger and it hurt.

The immediate response is: do whatever I can to avoid this.

And normally, that would have been the reaction.

This time, however, I just sat there, leaned in and felt it.

It felt like it would never go away, never dissipate.

I had to fight the urge to run away from it, to distract myself somehow.

Eventually, it subsided.

I have no idea how this experience has changed me. Maybe it hasn’t.

But maybe it has.

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*Originally published on [jer979](https://paragraph.com/@jer979-2/welcoming-the-pang)*