I learned the other day that a guy I dated for a pretty long time years ago had done some things recently that were really out of character for how I remembered him. I had not been in touch with him for years, so it wasn’t like I was following his life. But occasionally I would hear something about him, and this last information was just plain surprising.

All these years, I had considered him The One Who Got Away. Let me be clear—I broke up with him, and went on to marry my first husband which enabled me to move away from that town I grew up in, which probably saved my life. Nevertheless, I often thought of his character and his goals in life and thought with a little, but not too much, regret that maybe things could have been different if…

When I learned of this more recent behavior, I was suddenly released from that mild sense of regret that had been there, in the background of my life, for so long. The effect was as if I looked at a timeline of my life, and suddenly a thin thread of regret that had run along most of it was simply snagged away. It felt…strange. I had trouble even remembering what the regret felt like, or why I’d had it in the first place. The feeling was similar to that you might have when you walk through a room and you feel something is missing, but you don’t know what. And if it’s not something you need right away, you forget to care or even think about it again.

The point is the result is the same as if I knew all those years ago that I was making the right choice, instead of worrying that I was making a mistake. If I’d trusted I knew what I was doing, I would never have regretted choosing to move on. So now I’m wondering what it would be like if I broadened the scope of that little epiphany. What if I change a general belief that I’ve made mistakes into a belief that, at some level, I’ve always made the right choices? What if I trust this new belief by believing as well that perhaps the rightness of some of those choices may simply not be evident yet?

Wouldn’t this be like going into the past and doing something that changes the future? What other beliefs could I try this out on?