Regret Spectacles: A Field Guide
Here are four steps to changing your life (for the better, but it ain’t easy, and it ain’t fun):
Take your right hand and place it on the left side of your chest—where a pocket would be on a dress shirt.
Pretend to take a pair of glasses out of your imaginary pocket (or real, if you have one) and hold them in front of you with your right hand.
Use your other hand to open the temples of the glasses (the parts that go over your ears).
Lastly, put your imaginary glasses on your face with both hands.
Congratulations—you’re the proud owner of your very own “Regret Spectacles.” How do they feel? I know they’re not physically on your face, but for the purpose of this piece, let’s play pretend, like we’re seven years old.
These glasses were created in a cabalistic cave by mystics—in fact, they can bend the spacetime continuum—they allow you to see into the future, but more importantly, they let you feel the future.
Allow me to explain. I just spent several weeks in Austin, Texas. Prior to the trip, including the hours leading up to my departure, I didn’t want to go. I was riddled with fear, deathly afraid I’d fail at what I was going there to do, so I made up a ton of excuses to bail.
I didn’t know a thing about Austin. In fact, as I was attempting to build a coalition of supporters to join the “Hell No, Brad Won’t Go!” team, I’d convincingly tell anyone who’d listen, “You can put me in any city in America, and I know my way around, but not Austin.” I wasn’t comfortable with having to figure out a new city, though I’ve been doing so my entire adult life.
I also didn’t know anyone—actually, I knew one guy who I’d met a few months ago, but that was it. And for an introvert, that’s a roadmap to entering Dante’s ninth layer of hell.
No matter how you sliced it, I was going to Texas as naked as a newborn baby, which made for a lily-livered cocktail that I was inhaling to the tune of four highballs an hour. So, in lieu of being honest with myself, I started goose-stepping like a soldier—figuratively, of course—chanting, “Hell No, Brad Won’t Go!”
The fact is, there was something attached to the outcome of this trip that terrified me.
You see, I have lived a life of fearing fear. You know that famous speech of FDR’s: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” In my life, nothing could be truer. But I always move forward—eventually—only after I’ve exhausted every alternative and driven myself crazy (and everyone around me).
But not this time. No sir. I wasn’t going to Austin. For starters, it was too hot (it wasn’t). It was too…how do I say this…because even I knew this stretched the bounds of common sense…it was too culturally unfamiliar (again, it wasn’t). I was expecting cowboy hats and line dancing—and NOTHING could’ve been further from the truth. Austin has more of a Berkeley vibe than Houston or Dallas. In a nutshell, Austin was too __________ (insert just about anything), and that was reason enough not to go.
I was a mess.
And then I took my Regret Spectacles out of my pocket. I considered “accidentally” dropping them and then, like an insolent child, stomping them into smithereens. But what I couldn’t do was pretend they didn’t exist. Once I removed them from my imaginary pocket, there was no denying what I was holding—not physically, but a thought, really; an undeniable truth.
If you get used to wearing these things, there’s no escaping their existence. So, on they went, perched atop my nose, with me throwing a temper tantrum in my head.
When you put Regret Spectacles on, they transport you to an emotional state in the future. I knew I was going to Austin for three weeks, and when those spectacles were on my face, I could feel the regret of not going—drowning in it, really. But if I did go, I’d feel something completely different. And one thing’s for sure—time ain’t slowing down. Those three weeks were going to unfold no matter what. The only question was whether I spent them in Austin or somewhere else.
With my spectacles, I knew in real time that I’d feel awful had I chosen the cowardly route. I didn’t want to feel regret, and that’s what these spectacles do.
So, I keep my Regret Spectacles with me at all times. I wear them more often than you may think. I don’t just need them for the big decisions—I need them for most decisions.
Even though I wear traditional horn-rimmed glasses on account of actually having bad vision, I choose to see my Regret Spectacles as something totally different—they look like something Tom Ford would design. They’re edgy, stylish, and have an “F-You” attitude, because if they were a normal pair of reading glasses, I’d lose them in the seat cushions or in that annoying space between the car seat and center console.
They’re never fun to put on, but every time I do, I hear something I don’t want to, but must: “There is no comfort in growth, and there is no growth in comfort.”
