I Want to Live Like Animals

This may sound silly but do you remember the Savage Garden song from quite a few years ago now that said, "I want to live like animals, careless and free." Well, this was a beautiful song and while I was talking to a good friend of mine the other day it occurred to me that there are some fundamental differences in feelings between animals and humans that make us less likely to be "careless and free," so to speak.

While animals feel pain, pleasure, fear and love (some would debate this, but I am sure from my own experiences with my cat that they do feel love), there are two emotions animals lack: guilt, and regret.

It is true that humans are capable of some of the strongest and most beautiful emotions like love and trust, but the flipside is that regret and guilt are both very strong emotions too, and if we do not keep them in check, theye can become hugely self destructive. If only we could learn to have no regrets like the animals. If only somehow we could make our brain understand that at any point in time in our lives we make the best decision we can with the knowledge that was available to us in that situation.

If we only understood that hindsight is useless and self-berrating. We always do whatever we can with the circumstances available to us at our then present time. If we fully understood this, then we wouldn't need to regret because we would know that we did what we could. and nothing less. However, unfortunately we are obsesssed with hindsight. We become obsessed thinking about the past and what we think we should have done, we waste time regretting our actions or worse - feeling guilty about them, which is not only pointless, but also a waste of our precious time and is damaging to our emotional well-being.

When you find yourself regretting something, or feeling guilty - please try to remember: there are no wrong decisions in life - there are just experiences and lessons to be learnt. Please lets all try to live a little "like the animals," and set your soul free.