Regret

Most people if you listen...sometimes you have to listen closely due to elaborate cloaking mechanisms....most frame their lives into a positive spin...it's what we do...we almost need to in order to survive. Others whose lives have caught up with them and are fully wrapped around the axle are more 'realistic', they look back and see the pain, they look forward with hope and they are tentatively sober about the present...recognizing each day for the gift that it is...not guaranteed a tommorrow.
The spin doctors will look back and wish they had spent more time with their families, they will have wished they had taken the risk, they will have wished they had lived to the fullness of their calling, written the book, taken the journey...When they are old and dying in their beds their will be a tinge of regret but after a lifetime of spinning they will say " I did the best I could" the highly developed skill of mitigating regret will ease the thoughts.
Running the race means throwing off the 'encumberances'...which means or implies that we can't spin...we've got to come to terms with where we are...our rate of speed...and the obstacles that are tripping us up...I have a few encumberances and though I don't want to live a life of regret I refuse to dismiss or excuse or spin... This is what allows you to look to tommorrow, because you have the chance to right the regrets...If you spin it, dismiss it...you live in the comfort of denial, blinded by the light your own making.
The only way to live beyond regret is to face them in the past and present...Don't live in the past...but don't dismiss it either.