A Gentle Guide to Letting Go”
Pop Glossop’s Lecture on Tossing the “Could Haves” and “Should Haves”
Delivered in the Minor Hall of St. Cuthbert’s College for the Moderately Disillusioned
Ladies, gentlemen, and others still wondering whether they locked the front door this morning —
I come to you today not as a man of great wisdom — I once mistook an electric toothbrush for a fountain pen — but as one who has stared into the abyss of “could haves” and “should haves”, and promptly spilled tea on it.
Now, you may be wondering: what is this “Toss Away the ‘Could Haves’ and ‘Should Haves’ Day”, and why should I, a person with unpaid parking fines and a burgeoning cactus collection, care?
Splendid question.
Let us begin by admitting, quite candidly, that we all possess a small collection of regrets. Some are minor: “I shouldn’t have eaten that third éclair.” Others loom large: “I should have told Daphne I loved her before she married that man with the moustache and the jet ski.”
It is a universal affliction, like flat soda or ill-advised fringe haircuts.
But lo! In the year of our confusion (somewhere around 2005), a rather sensible woman named Martha J. Ross-Rodgers had a thought. She looked out at a world groaning under the weight of emotional carry-on luggage and declared, “Right then, toss it!”
Not in a fit of rage, mind you — she wasn’t hurling fine china across the breakfast room — but in a spirit of graceful release. Thus, Toss Away the ‘Could Haves’ and ‘Should Haves’ Day was born.
It is held, appropriately, on July 20th — a date that gives one just enough time to regret half the year and still redeem the remainder.
Now, as the inestimable Kuvempu (a poet of the first water, if I may say) once said — and I quote loosely in the spirit of poetic license:
“Let yesterday belong to yesterday, today to today, and tomorrow — well, let it worry about itself.”
It’s like something my Aunt Belinda used to say while decanting sherry: “Life is a river, darling. Don’t stand there pointing at the puddles behind you.”
The problem, you see, is that we human creatures are relentlessly retrospective. We write mental postmortems on everything. “If only I’d studied French instead of Latin…” we murmur, as though fluent Gallic conversation would have spared us that awkward dinner party in 2016.
We should have been more courageous, more romantic, more decisive, more timely.
And could we have? Possibly. But we didn’t. And that’s the entire point.
Now, you may ask, “Pop, must I forget everything and go frolicking through the present like a Labrador with no sense of consequence?”
Certainly not! Frolicking is dangerous business. I once frolicked in my youth and sprained a dignity.
But letting go is not the same as forgetting. It is about unclenching the mental fist. It’s about saying, “Yes, I made that mistake — but I’m not going to build a summer home in its shadow.”
You are, if I may be bold, not your regrets. You are what you do with them. And ideally, what you do is this: you learn, you laugh, and you lurch gloriously forward, hopefully with fewer jelly stains on your shirt.
Now, some observe the day with symbolic rituals: burning pieces of paper with regrets written on them, floating away their “should haves” on eco-friendly balloons, or burying a time capsule labelled “Do not open, contains excessive brooding.”
These are all admirable pursuits. I, myself, prefer to sit in a deckchair with a gin and tonic and say to the horizon, “Well, that didn’t go to plan, did it?” And then I toast it. Because if nothing else, it tried.
So, my dear friends and future philosophers of personal misadventure, let us — on this day, and perhaps a few others — lay down our burdens, not with drama, but with dignity.
Toss the “could haves.” Yeet the “should haves.” And if you must look back, let it be with the affectionate squint one gives to an old school photo — awkward, yes, but yours.
After all, as the poster in my dentist’s office once said:
“Don’t put things off until the eleventh hour. You might die at 10:30.”
Thank you, and mind the dais on your way out.
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