It’s a hefty order to fill—a year without regrets? Many people claim that they have no regrets to begin with, but you have to wonder… if he or she didn’t regret dancing on the table and falling, crushing his or her hip and puking all over the bouncer at once, there’s probably something wrong. “Oh, it was a learning experience,” people will say—but can you honestly say you wouldn’t go back an change something in your life if you could?

Still, “No regrets” is a pretty positive mentality—even if some people might use it as an excuse to back out of personal responsibility. Why not try to live a year on that kind of mentality, while still keeping your conscience in the picture?

The thing is, I have so many regrets in my life that I don’t know how to even begin this way of living. Here are a few things I have in mind, but I’d love more input from those who say that they live without regrets.

• Look at everything as a learning experience. One of my biggest regrets was taking my younger sisters to see the film Scary Movie at the theater. Yes, it was completely inappropriate and yes, I should have made them leave; I simply had never walked out of a movie before and didn’t even think about it. I was about sixteen at the time, and looking back, I realize it was stupid—but people have done worse things with their siblings, right? It doesn’t make me a bad person… neither, by the way, does singing Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” to scare the crap out of my little sister. Um, right?
• Allow for mistakes. If I didn’t make them, I wouldn’t be human, right? Our humanness allows for some poor decision-making. Yes, I would have probably finished college a semester earlier if I hadn’t wasted time brooding and skipping my eight o’clocks, but overall I did okay, considering I had to work multiple jobs and managed to both volunteer and have a baby before I graduated only a semester late.
• Think of the positives. I pretty much listed an example of this with the last point, but the idea here is to look at whatever you regret so much and think about anything good that came out of it—or maybe anything that karmically (I know that’s not a word, but that’s exactly what I mean!) balances it out. For example, I really regret smacking a dog when I was a kid because it was trying to bite my cat. He was just following his instincts, and right after I hit him I knew it was the wrong thing to do and felt terribly. But I’ve also rescued a lot of animals and found homes for them, as well as volunteered for animal rights and donated to shelters. While this doesn’t condone what I did (like a person who murders people can’t be condoned because he delivers babies or saves lives, right?), it puts it into perspective for me; I know that I made a mistake, but that overall that doesn’t make me a terrible person.