One of the stragglers came into my office the other morning to talk. She sat on a desk and asked me if I had any regrets.

After stacking a few papers and taking a sip of tea I swiveled my chair to look at her, “No” I said, “I don’t have any regrets.”

She shifted her weight, cocked her head and paused to wait for me to take back what I just said. After a few moments she verified my statement, “None?”

“None,” I echoed, “What are you worried about regretting?”

She didn’t give me a straight answer, but hinted that she was worried about making a wrong decision. She is a senior, very involved and very worried about making the most out of her final year of high school.

“I’ve not always thought that I don’t regret anything,” I told her, “but after we make decisions we have to be totally present. There is no room for regret or we will have no grasp on the only thing available to us: the time we are currently in.”

She nodded and we talked about the upcoming Oral Interp contest and tried to piece together a few poems. Soon she had to go and I finished grading some papers.

After I entered all of my grades I began to answer an email from a friend in Chicago and I thought about how much I can’t wait to live in the Windy City after I’m done teaching.

I arranged some chairs in my room and assassinated a few flies by the window when I remember thinking, “Reagan, are you committing the same crime as regret? Your forward thinking is removing you from the present.”

Though I show up each day, I’m not always totally there. I’m not crippled by regrets from the past, I’m leaning too much on the future, on what will happen next instead of what I can control here and now.

I suppose I need to fess up to my regretful student that I do have a regret: not investing every second of myself into every day here. That is all I can do. That is all I must do.