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I was walking home late one evening when a patchy orange cat came out of a dark side street and pressed against my jeans. I kept walking. It came with me.
It’s a small thing, being followed by a cat. But it brings with it, almost immediately, a certain kind of problem that didn’t exist before. I had not sought the creature out. Still, there it was, keeping pace, its decision to draft me as its friend for the night having been made.
There are moments like this that arrive without permission and ask for some response. You can accept what’s been placed in front of you or you can reject it. Either way, you must choose.
For my part, I tried to go on as I had, but the cat trailed me. I turned around. The cat did, too. So, I stood there. This animal, I thought, must have its own home to return to. I’d regret taking it back to mine. Then a second cat, this one black, ran up to meet us.
In the middle of the quiet street, I now stood with two cats.
I stayed put, staring at them staring at me. After enough of that, the black one slipped under a parked car. The orange cat lingered, then wandered off.
Walking home, I found I missed my cats. My life was a little more ordinary again because I didn’t let them tag along. So, I turned to thoughts of 19th-century theologian, philosopher, poet and critic Søren Aabye Kierkegaard.
“If you marry, you will regret it,” Kierkegaard wrote. “If you do not marry, you will also regret it.”
Kierkegaard described the kind of double regret that afflicted me. Most decisions are not between right and wrong, but between two goods. Choose one at the cost of the other. Some regret shows either path was worthwhile.
I could have taken the cat home and accepted the duties that would follow. Instead, I let it leave, with the unfortunate impression I was a bore, standing there, staring at it — far from the exciting, on-a-mission walker it had met earlier that night.
In the days since the fateful encounter with my feline friends, I continued to think fondly on us three, ships passing in the night, the waves we stir with our wakes gently nudging the others’ charted courses. But I don’t regret not taking home the cat. I became, after all, the kind of person who makes that choice.
This smaller decision has a larger cousin. About a year earlier, I reached a different crossroads. After six months of classes to become Catholic, the Saturday before Easter had arrived. I had a choice: be baptized that night, or delay it another year.
In much the same way, this decision seemed to spring on me. It also threatened to give a sharper shape to my life’s then-more malleable material, especially baptism, an “indelible” mark. Indelible as such a mark is, it chooses one possibility at the cost of closing others.
Just as, for some reason, I chose not to lead the cats home, for some reason, I decided to rally and throw myself into baptism that night. So I became the kind of person who is baptized and doesn’t regret it.
The longer you live and the more decisions you make, I expect the weight of alternative possibilities lessens. In hindsight, it seems harder to make a regrettable choice than in the moment.
When you reflect on past choices, you’re looking through the mind you have now, but that mind has been molded through those choices you’ve already made. The room you have for regret shrinks. Indeed, older adults showed more positive responses to missed chances than younger adults studied in research published in the journal “Science” in 2012. Researchers identified “reduced sensitivity” as a strong safeguard for “emotional health” in later life.
Yet at the time in question, why one choice won against another equally appealing option is murkier to peer into. That on-a-whim character of so many decisions poses a problem: How do we make a choice that is authentically ours, not just in hindsight, but in the spur of the moment? Are we so free at every fork in the road that we can only throw ourselves rashly down one path — be baptized or leave the cats?
Eric Cannon (he/him) is a sophomore studying philosophy and political science and currently serves as a member of IU Student Government.
