“Amazing, just amazing,” I observed repeatedly with each photo of the northern lights.
We were waiting for the children to begin their ballet routines. The parents sitting next to us at our granddaughter’s dance recital showed us their pictures of the northern lights on their cell phones. Lori and I oohed and ahhed at the various purple, green, and yellow colors shimmering across the night sky.
Just as the little ballerinas lined up, I whispered to Lori how I wished we had known about the northern lights.
Later that day, Lori showed me several photos people had posted of the previous night’s display.
“How did we not know about it?” I asked.
Then, another friend in our community sent us her pics. “We’re supposed to see them again tonight,” she said, along with her helpful instructions on viewing them with our cell phones.
An internet source confirmed we would have one more opportunity to see the aurora borealis.
So we started watching at 10 pm. We walked outside about every 15 minutes, peering into the heavens, and stayed up just past midnight.
Nothing.
Lori was determined. She awoke at 2 am. I followed her to the front porch and then to the backyard.
Nothing.
We were up again at 3:30, 5, then again at 7.
“So much for a good night’s sleep,” I muttered as I gave up and started brewing coffee.
“What happened?” Lori asked.
“More like, ‘what didn’t happen?'” I answered, sipping my coffee. “We missed it— a day late,” I concluded.
I thought of my dad taking my brother and me fishing at Possum Kingdom Lake in Texas when we were kids. Sometimes, we reeled them in; other times, we sat for hours with no catch. Invariably, someone at the bait shop would tell us as we shared our sad story, “You should have been here yesterday.”
“You should have been here yesterday.” I’m sure it’s on a plaque for sale at a Cracker Barrel somewhere.
Sometimes, we miss opportunities because we don’t know, like Lori and me with the northern lights. We can’t help that. We might wish for what we missed, but this is no reason for remorse.
It’s the opportunities we know we had and didn’t take that disturb us.
It’s the letter we were going to write to that friend who has now passed away; it’s the dinner we bypassed with someone who has moved on; or the ballgame we left because we grew impatient, only to learn later that the child or grandchild hit a home run five minutes later; it’s the person we were determined to visit in the retirement center until it was too late; it’s the longing to end a relationship with “I love you,” now that it’s no longer possible for them to hear the words.
“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine,” penned poet Mary Oliver.
But the worst regret is not to have lived, truly. The ultimate remorse is to have wasted days and years—a life—gazing backward, consumed with guilt for the missed opportunities, carrying burdens from the past into the present, robbing each day of its life, one by one, unaware that the days are slipping through our fingers until it’s too late and our life is done. It’s our final day.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Sonnet 97, in “The House of Life,” has those haunting words, “Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been/I am also call’d No-more, Too-late, Farewell.”
Before retiring Sunday night, I glanced at my cell phone pictures from the day before and smiled at my granddaughter’s ballet poses: first position, second position, then on her toes, the grand plie—all the while, flitting about the room like a butterfly testing its wings —a repressed grin camouflaging her satisfaction with her beginner’s performance.
And maybe, just perhaps, a part of her smile bloomed from the awareness that someone was there just for her, that in that moment, someone she loved relished this one-time opportunity with her.
I had missed the lights, but something just as magical, at least for me, had happened.
Whispering Psalm 4:8, “I will lie and sleep in peace,” I drifted off, assured that I had lived, really lived, that day.