Today is the fourth Sunday of Lent. I have blogged every day during Lent, beginning on Ash Wednesday, February 17. Tonight I reflect on the time past in this season that continues. Tonight I apologize to my regrets for not hearing what they have to tell me.

My Lenten discipline to give up silence is paired with my Lenten discipline to start reading blogs again. Both parts have been liberating, but painful too. Committing to feeling both of these things at once, again, has been the discipline. Part of that discipline is not to surrender to diminishment, whether by pandemic or otherwise. Part of that discipline is to maintain my own momentum despite the painful parts. All of that is worth doing, though I have to be careful.

All the emotions get going full-strength as I read Tom Woodward’s series of long-goodbye posts. The feelings emerge because of memories, but they also emerge, with unusual clarity, because of the strength of Tom’s writing.

As Tom tells the story of his biology and environmental science VCU projects, he expresses regret and a sense of frustrated or blocked ambition in ways that help me learn from my own past, a past that, in this very large area first publicly represented by this very blog, I have worked pretty hard to set aside. Now I want and need to do something else, something better. I’ve known all along that my past can be accepted, and then built on, but it can’t be ignored or avoided. Now I decide. That’s a big reason I’ve taken on this Lenten practice.

Tom writes,

If these regrets tell me one thing it’s to get moving and do the things while you can. Time and people move on so swiftly. None of this is wasted though. The ideas and conversations come back around. They shape future conversations and enable future possibilities.

I don’t think I’ve read a more succinct, articulate, and bracing statement of regret, and determination, and hope. I seek to emulate all of that, because it’s part of the way back, and because I owe it to the self I look back on, the one who tried so hard in those few years to make a positive difference and to empower others to do the same.

I do have regrets and I don’t trust people who say they don’t. My Lenten discipline is to listen to those regrets, to sit with them. They tell me what Tom’s regrets tell him. I need to hear that, and learn a stronger way forward.