1 . How to Learn from Your Regrets

Regret’s benefits don’t come to us by chance.     1     . Here are three steps you can take the next time you find yourself thinking carefully about your past missteps.

Kill the ghost (鬼魂).

People often say their regrets keep coming to their mind. This suggests that regret is like a ghost. Bring your ghost out of the shadows by making a list of your regrets. Write down why each one still bothers you and its bad effects.     2    .

Forgive yourself.

    3    , but sometimes you just can’t stop blaming yourself. Perhaps you dropped out of school decades ago and are constantly calculating today how much money you would be making if you had pressed on to graduation. Now is the time to declare: “I will not waste my life reliving a decision that cannot be changed.”

Collect your diploma.

Regret is like a school run by human nature. If you never experienced regret, you would keep repeating the same behaviors that led you to miss opportunities.     4    . Next. list all the ways that you can invest in your own skills and improvement right now — and get started.

Regrets may hurt.     5    , while trying to live without them is a lost opportunity to grow. Life is a journey full of pleasures and pains. To live it well and fully means learning from every bit of it, including the mistakes, and moving forward.

2 . My younger brother has a strange relationship with birthdays. One year, he sent me an unexpected birthday card, which turned out to be a double _________ as it arrived four months after my birthday.

“You should just _________ when you feel like it, and not be restricted (限制) to a specific day,” he said.

“So basically, that means it doesn’t _________ when my birthday is. You just get to celebrate the day I was _________ any time you like, even though I _________ to celebrate it on the actual date?” I asked.

“You’ve always been a little over the top about _________,” he said.

“Fine. But I always remember yours,” I said. I would _________ forget the day he was born.

The first year my daughter was away at college, he missed her birthday. By then, we both knew her _________ had many great attributes (特征) except remembering birthdays.

Her birthday is in September. In January of the following year, she _________ a letter. It was from her uncle. No card. Just some __________ and a note that said, “Buy whatever you want.”

She later told me the special gift from her uncle __________ made her happy. The idea of surprising her when she was least __________ it was amazing.

And it continued. Once he __________ us with several stylish hats and it was no one’s birthday. He had described our __________ to the saleswoman and she had __________ what she thought each of us might like. And she was right; we all liked our gifts.

So this year I was a bit __________ when he called me the day after my birthday. Was his __________ attitude towards birthdays disappearing? Had he been dragged (拖) down by societal expectations to behave __________?

“I’m __________ I missed your birthday yesterday,” he said.

“You’re __________ to do that. It’s what makes you my brother,” I replied.