Regret is Unavoidable; and That’s Okay

Song Story: New England

Ooh
Sometimes I think I want adventure
But ooh
I saw a man holding hands with his daughter
And now ooh
When I get lonely I dream
Of you and me, New England and summer

It’s Friday, July 19th, 2024. I’m sitting in my brother’s house while he and his wife are away visiting New Jersey. The hum of their old AC unit sounds behind me, and I see their wetsuits hanging on the wall in front of me, behind the kitchen table.

I wrote New England around two and a half years ago now, though of course, as everyone seems sentimentally obligated to say, it doesn’t feel that long ago. I only started making the demo two or three days ago, but it’s really coming along, and I’m feeling like it might be my favorite song yet.

Multiple times throughout the process of finally laying the song down and listening back, I’ve felt profoundly moved—sometimes close to the point of tears. I think most artists can attest to the fact that feeling these types of emotions listening to your own music is quite rare. And I think there are two reasons I feel so strongly about this song: 1) because I think it’s actually just a good song, but 2) because I’m still experiencing the very same feelings that inspired me to write it two and a half years ago. In fact, I think I’m experiencing them now even more strongly than I ever did back then. I’ll return to that later on.

New England is a song about regret. It’s a song about your past choices, and wondering what life could have been like had you taken another path. When I wrote this song in 2021, I was working in Wyoming, and was still yet to embark on the backpacking journey that would come to form the heart of this album. I was literally thirsting for adventure, and wanted nothing more than to break free of the routine and monotony of stationary life and experience something new.

But even then, with that restlessness inside me, there was something else. And funnily enough, that something else was in many ways the antithesis of the desire for adventure that I felt so acutely back then. It was the desire for stability, and a woman to love, and a family to protect and provide for. Wonderful, meaningful, human things. And even back then, there was enough of these desires to get me to write this song.

I’m not sure I want these written posts to be in-depth analyses of the songs themselves—but regardless, the first verse of this song seems like the appropriate place to start here. It actually comes from a Charles Dickens novel, Great Expectations. (As a side note, I’m embarrassed to say that as of the date I’m writing this, I’ve tried and failed to get through more than about 50 pages of that book—one day.)

Joe made the fire and swept the hearth, and then we went to the door to listen for the chaise-cart. It was a dry cold night, and the wind blew keenly, and the frost was white and hard. A man would die to-night of lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.

I first heard this quote in a movie, and I’m pretty sure I immediately paused it and rewound it to let it fully sink in. These men of old, like Charles Dickens, really were heavyweights. That sheer substance of storytelling and imagination is really difficult to find in any sort of modern works, and yet these old ones seem positively full of them.

To be fair, I also think this quote hit extra hard because I was living at the time in the mountains of Wyoming in the middle of winter. Temperatures sunk to below zero on some nights, giving me an excellent idea of what it would feel like to freeze to death, and the stars—I’m sitting at my keyboard shaking my head, trying to find the words to describe their brightness, their number, and their clarity, but no adequate ones come to mind. You just have to go there and see them for yourself.

Regardless, I remember being taken aback by this quote—and I still am today, when I can force myself to push past the familiarity and really grasp the words for what they mean. What would that be like? To be in the most severe agony as your limbs succumb to frostbite; to really come face-to-face with the fact that you’re going to die, probably in the next few minutes; to look around, and perhaps scream for help, but to no avail; and then to look up and see a sky full of stars, of such shining beauty and wonder, a sight that normally would make you smile and feel lucky to be alive—only to have those same stars stare down upon you with the coldest, crystalline indifference imaginable. Whether you survive or whether you freeze to death in anguish, they won’t care. They never have, and they never will. Probably untold thousands of your own ancestors have looked up at those very same stars at their own moments of death, begging for their lives under the cold, merciless glitter.

For a lot of different reasons, many of which have to do with the movie I was watching that night, this cold-death-under-the-stars scenario became a metaphor for me. A metaphor of what I felt (and still feel) it would be like to go through life alone—with no family of your own and no children to carry your heartbeat and blood down through the generations.

These are things that I felt then—and man, how much more do I feel them now. In this season of life, as I sit here writing this, I feel very much alone. I know that sounds dramatic, and it honestly feels a bit ludicrous—I grew up with the best family and the best group of friends imaginable.

But I’m about one month into California life, having driven all the way over from New Jersey in the middle of June. Like I mentioned earlier, my brother and his wife, who live in California as well, are visiting family back home—they’ve been gone for about two weeks now, and they won’t be back for another 10 days. My other brother, in the Marine Corps (Semper Fidelis), and his wife, are going to be moving here soon as well—so things will change soon.

But as of now, I’m alone. I haven’t made new friends here in California yet, and I’m feeling that lack in a profound way. It’s honestly pretty ironic—back in New Jersey, I felt like the challenge was usually, “How can I kindly say I don’t really feel like hanging out tonight?” Now I would give an arm and a leg for a group of friends to harass me until I agreed to throw on a jacket and go join them for some poker.

But above all of these feelings—far above all of these feelings, like Mount Everest looming over that scenic overlook you like to hike up sometimes—is the burning need for female companionship and family. Of all the primal urges I’m prone to as a human, this one stands unrivaled.

One really important recurring theme I notice as I get older is that there are certain truths or events that register in your mind at a very surface level when you first start to consider them, and they stay there for quite some time. But then there comes a day when you get it. You just get it. And you can try to explain it to someone else, but they’re only going to understand it at that same surface level you did until they get older, and then they finally just get it. For me, a real, long-term relationship with a woman (and a resulting family of my own) is one of these things. Man, do I get it now.

I used to relish living alone. I absolutely loved it. I loved the peace, the quiet, the time to think, the ability to leave the dirty dishes in the sink overnight if I was just too tired to wash them. I even loved my little twin bed, going to sleep and waking up totally alone. At 23, when I first wrote New England in my little room in Wyoming, there were little glimmers that this time was coming to an end. Now, at 25, it’s long past.

There are visions I get every once in a while of what my life can still someday turn out to be. And I don’t mean visions in a dramatic sense—I just mean pictures that pop into my head at random moments.

Waking up in the middle of the night with moonlight streaming in through the window, illuminating the impossibly smooth skin of my wife’s back as she sleeps. Meeting my first daughter—my actual daughter—this little human who would never have existed if it wasn’t for me and my wife, seeing our own faces reflected back at us in hers. Looking out across a vast, grassy front yard, mountains in the background bordered by rolling ocean waves, a bright sun shining down on a beautiful woman who I somehow get to call my own, with a baby on her hip. Dirt, sweat, bugs, runny noses, bruises, kisses, messy dinners. And love. Not inherited love, like the love I feel for my parents and siblings—my own love, from me and for me.

We can take any of a huge number of paths in life, but we do have to take a path—and the path we take has consequences, and sometimes those consequences make us regret the path we chose and wonder if we made the wrong choice.

After moving to Wyoming for four months, returning home briefly, backpacking for nine months, returning home again, and finally moving to Tanzania for another four months as a volunteer, I’d spent around two years simply traveling and experiencing life—not building one for myself. When I returned home for “good” a few months ago, I realized I’d fallen behind. Many of my friends had been promoted a few times at their jobs, were now earning really good money, and had nice things—things that were pretty far out of reach for me, a traveling freelance writer on a shoestring budget.

But something important to realize is that not all regret, not all missed opportunities, are absolute. To strongly regret something does not mean that, if you could, you’d go back in time and change it all. I feel lonely now, and I feel behind in a lot of practical ways, but the path I chose—travel, adventure, and human experience—has given me something so utterly magical that I would never really even attempt to explain it to my friends or family—they just wouldn’t get it. And perhaps missing out on that magic is something that my friends and family regret about the paths they’ve chosen.

So there are always costs. There are pros and cons. There’s no one “right” way to live your life—each path comes with its own array of experience and wisdom, and in the end, what really matters is what you choose to do with what you’ve learned from your path.

So if you’ve been excitedly reading this, hoping to arrive at some grand conclusion where everything comes together and makes sense, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Life is gritty. There’s not always a rhyme or reason to everything.

Literally speaking, New England isn’t some grand, universal ballad that everyone can relate to in some way—the same way that there’s nothing particularly significant about the region of New England, except that it’s a place I really happen to like.

No—the song is raw. It’s a bitter, tear-stained account of the profound regret and sorrow I feel when I consider the other types of beauty and fulfillment that I passed by in my rush to adventure.

It’s me worrying about how close I am to becoming that man Charles Dickens wrote about in Great Expectations—exiting this life alone, with screams and cries that echo into the unimaginable beauty of familial love that others have already laid hold of, only to be met with pitiless silence. It’s me fearing that I’m going to wake up one day and find that it is, in fact, too late.

The last thing I want to say here is the same thing I try to say in the final section of New England (a section that was added well over a year after I first wrote the song): “I was scared of making choices, but I guess I made one all the same.”

As someone who tends to overthink quite a bit, I know the short-term comfort that often comes from just putting things off. And when it comes to the big questions of what your life is going to be like, it can feel especially tempting to put them off for later—and then when later comes, you just put them off for even later.

But then there’s going to come a day where you realize, in spite of all that pushing off you did, that your cards have been played whether you meant to play them or not.

And if the cards are going to be played, why not play them yourself? After all, there’s more than one way to win.