Naturally and understandably we tend to find ourselves deluded by the mirage of hindsight and wishful thinking. It seems as though there were options to have done differently, for things to go differently, to be better. We regret and yearn for otherness. In a theoretical sense this may be true; there were potential different options to choose from in the past and different potential ways for things to go in the future but in this reality, the one we must live, there was no option to have done differently and there is no other way for things to go. Every decision you've made is the best and only decision you could've made at the time with the information you had and the state of mind you were in and every condition of life that either these decisions led to or that are fundamental to life in general, you have no control over and cannot change. To regret or desire to go back and edit the past assumes that the things we wish to change, presumably things we perceive and interpret as negative are, in the bigger picture, purely negative - or somehow avoidable in an equivalent sense. It assumes that one could know what is truly and ultimately best, how things would have gone if they went differently and that somehow one would not still find themselves in a likely similar state of regret and loathing if they did. It is not necessarily that life could have been different that is the problem but that we resist finding the beauty in how it inevitably has gone. Resenting or fighting against what has happened to you or because of you only brings additional misery onto the now, exasperating and adding more to resent and resist. Like pouring a gasoline of regret onto a fire of unchangeable circumstances, we only unnecessarily intensify the flames. The true challenge and task of life, for Nietzsche, is to fall in love with what you are actually experiencing right now, as it is, in all the ways it is. "I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things' then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor Fati: Let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer." - Friedrich Nietzsche. This overcoming of regret and loathing and resistance, the question posed in Nietzsche's eternal recurrence of whether or not you would want to live your life over, whether or not you love or could love your life, is not at all obvious or easy. In the previous quote it should be noted that it concludes with the words "some day I wish to be.." Arguably Nietzsche alluded to it as a task of existence because of how difficult and perhaps unlikely it is for most people to say yes to. Perhaps the notion of amor fati is more of an ideal that Nietzsche establishes to strive toward. Ultimately, to experience the moments of treachery and loneliness, failure and disaster, loss and death, all the rest that pervades existence and to still say yes, I love it, is perhaps impossible in a specific case-by-case sense but perhaps in certain moments of high enough spirits, sufficiently distanced from misfortune, it is possible to practice a certain love for the whole of it. And for Nietzsche, achieving this is the greatest affirmation of life, which can then be used to construct the lens through which we see the beauty in everything and more frequently arrive at that resounding yes. Ultimately, the question might not be how much you love your life right now but how much you could and how and perhaps sometimes the only way to experience the beauty of things is to think about things in a beautiful way... However amor fati, need not deny the notion of trying to overcome and accomplish, of trying to thrash and swim against the current of existence and achieve things within it or control where it takes us; rather one's fate includes this. It includes trying to overcome life's conditions and failing in some ultimate sense. Amor fati is a sentiment of willingness to accept at last the way things have gone and will go, to love a life that tries in almost every moment to make you hate it, and to still stare back at it and say, yes, I love it. What's scarier than an opponent who smiles while being beaten?
Words from a Youtube video that I thought was inspiring. The title of the Youtube video is These Simple Words Can Change How You Think About The Past - Nietzsche and is by the channel Pursuit of Wonder.
