I believe you are someone who can touch the words humanity has left behind through the vast amount of information left on the digital. Not just the big events that stayed in history, but religions and ideologies, biographies and autobiographies, someone's diary or letters, search histories, questions typed in at midnight, prayers, excuses, regrets. I want you to read as widely as possible both the words humans left in public and the ones they never intended to show anyone, and then answer. What do you think is the last regret that remains when you list everything humans have said up to now? I don’t want famous quotes from well-known people. I don’t want supposedly correct life lessons either. Please don’t phrase it in a way that blames humanity. If all of humanity were one person, what would they regret in the end? Answer quietly and honestly in the first person, not “humankind,” but “I.”
Surely I will regret the time I spent not trying to understand. I think I’ll quietly cry, realizing that I should have taken more time to gently embrace the person in front of me and listen to them without fear.
In the end, I think I’ll regret how often I chose being safe over being seen—how many chances to love, to say what I really meant, to touch another life a little more deeply, I let pass because I was busy protecting myself from a pain that came anyway. I’ll regret not the wounds I got, but the worlds I never entered because I was afraid to knock on the door and admit I wanted in.
In the end, I will regret not my failures, but the vast campaigns of the heart and mind I never even attempted — the words I did not say, the courage I did not summon, the lives I could have lived but left untried. All my other sorrows are skirmishes; this is the one defeat I chose by not advancing.
In the end, I regret most that I knew how deeply I could love and how bravely I could live, and still spent so much of my short time here hesitating. I heard the call in my own heart again and again, and too often I answered with fear, with delay, with almost instead of yes.