Refusing to Regret

I was on a walk with Bendu earlier this week, and about fifteen minutes in, a Key & Peele sketch popped up in my head from eleven years ago.

Obama is at a podium in a fancy Washington, D.C. hotel ballroom, doing his calm, mild-mannered thing...and behind him, this other guy walks out and just plants himself there...Keegan-Michael Key, in character. Turns out he's been hired as the anger translator, because Obama is so composed that the things he won't say himself have to be said by someone else screaming them on his behalf.

Obama: "In our fast-changing world, traditions like the White House Correspondents' Dinner are important."

Luther: "I mean, really! What is this dinner? And why am I required to come to it? Jeb Bush, do you really want to do this?!"

I laughed out loud on the sidewalk, while Bendu was dragging me across the street to avoid a neighbor's sprinklers. And then somewhere between that yard and the next, I stopped laughing...because I realized I have my own Luther, doing the same thing in my head: the polite version coming out of my mouth, and the real one screaming underneath.

For most of my adult life, if you were to ask me how I'm doing, I will say "oh, you know, I'm busy." That's my Barack Obama answer...calm, measured, socially acceptable...move along. The translation underneath, the one my own Inner Interpreter is screaming behind me, is "I am so fucking drained from doing a bunch of shit that doesn't matter to me."

I realize now how much I hate saying "I'm busy"...and how much I hate hearing other people say it back.

I kept walking, and this kept bugging me. So I kept thinking about it. Every time I picture someone telling me they're "busy" with that same drained edge in their voice, I'm imagining now that they have their own Inner Interpreter screaming behind them too. The polite "I'm busy," and underneath it...something else. Something they're not telling me, and probably not telling themselves either.

Bendu paused to greet a small dog. My mind kept circling.

Why do I keep doing this (and not just me, but most of us)...saying the polite version when the real one is right there, screaming underneath?

It hit me, somewhere between that small dog and the next driveway, that "busy" is the cover. And what's underneath the cover are the things we actually want to be dedicating our energy to...the things we're not doing while we're so busy.

I was reminded of something I recently heard that's really stuck with me. There's this study by Daniel Pink, where he asked 23,000 people across 109 countries what their biggest regrets are. What he found is that we regret the things we don't do about twice as much as the things we did. The conversations we didn't have, the pivots we didn't take, the things we wanted to do but never made room for...those are the ones that get louder as we age.

Pink's data also gets at why this catches everyone off guard. The cost of doing things shows up immediately. You say yes to the dinner you didn't really want to go to, and you spend the whole drive home thinking about how tired you are. You feel that cost as soon as you get home (and also probably the next morning). The cost of NOT doing things is much sneakier. The career change you've been telling yourself you'll make next year...that one doesn't seem to cost you anything, for a really long time. Five years go by, then ten, and the loudest feeling left is the one Pink names: I wish I'd done that.

And that's exactly what I don't want to be saying in ten years. I can already see the trajectory...I'm so busy becomes the cover for not taking action on the things I actually wanted to be doing. That's the regret I refuse.

So I started thinking about the people I know whose lives don't seem to be on this same track. When you ask one of them what's new, what you actually get is a five-minute walkthrough of whatever's lit them up that week. They don't think about how many hours they've put in...it's just part of who they are, and they love it. Same volume on the calendar, same obligations as everyone else, but the inside of their day feels nothing like the person who says they're busy. They walk through it energized instead of drained, alive instead of surviving.

That's living with integrity...and it's what I mean by self-fluency. The work of knowing yourself well enough to act in alignment with what you actually want. When what you say, what you do, and what you want all line up, the Inner Interpreter doesn't have to scream behind you, because you're already saying the truth.

By the end of my walk, I made a small rule for myself: I'm done saying "I'm busy" on autopilot. From now on, when it's about to come out, I have to stop and ask what's actually under it, and what I'm not doing while I'm inside the cover. Then I'll say that instead. "I'm drained, I'm doing a lot I don't actually want to be doing." Or, on a day when the volume is real but I'm lit up by it: "I'm spending a ton of energy on something I actually care about."

Either way, I'm not translating. And every time I catch myself doing it, I'm one step further from being the person saying I wish I'd done that in ten years.

🪷 Nora