It’s a beautiful day; the gloom is gone. I was doing something I rarely do this morning, mourning the loss of my friend George Forss and regretting that I didn’t spend more time with him before he died last year.

I was reading the book about George that the great photographer David Douglas Duncan published about him. George’s New York City landscapes were so beautiful that I cried. Duncan came across George on sidewalk in Manhattan, the photos he saw George selling were so beautiful he didn’t believe George could possibly taken them.

He dragged George over to Time Magazine, where Duncan worked, and George ended up on the magazine’s cover. Frightened by his success, he fled New York City to open a funky art gallery in the small town of Cambridge and spent his life caring for his partner Donna, an artist, his very sick mother Norma, and his brother Mickey, a gentle schizophrenic.

George was all about brilliant, love and responsibility. He devoted his life to the searc for aliens, other people and his photogoraphy.  And boy, was he strange. We bonded from the first. The highlight of my photographic life was the joing photo show I did with George at the Round House Cafe.

I think the older people get, the more frequent are the twinges of regret. They open the door to our reviting the ideas, ambitions, mistakes and motives that brought us to where we are now. They remind us of the people we loved and missed or failed, and the motives that brought us to where we are now.

A life is all about the choices we mave in the past that have made us the people we are today.

“By all means,” writes  Joan Chitisster, “we must look back. By all means we must ask ourselves why we are where we are. And we must ask, too, why we did not do all the things we thought, at least at one time, we wanted to do, we should have done.”

Those answers, she suggests, tell us who we are and how we got here.

 

 

I rarely look back in my life and spend little time on regret, but I loved George dearly and yet I couldn’t be around him in the last months of his life. We were so important to one another, and he was so important to me. George never saw himself as a world famous and legendary photography, but he was.

I couldn’t stop sobbing while reading the book and wishing I had gotten the chance to spend more time with him, he taught me so much, we were too oddballs and outcasts in a way who came to love one another. He taught me so much about photography.

For me, the burden of regret is essential for me to experience, but not be obsessed or consumed by. I can’t know who I am if I didn’t understand how I happened.

I need to know the value of the choices I made in order to see the gifts and good things they brought me too.

Regrets seem pointless to me if they are only about regret. There are lessons to learn. Regret, like anger, is a part of being human.

“The blessings of regret is clear,” wrote Chitisster, “it brings us, if we are willing to face it head on, to the point of being present in this time of life in an entirely new way. ”

For me, regret is healthy, kind of a cleansing of the spirit. It inspires and encourages me to to continue becoming, learning and growing. Godspeed to you, George, I imagine you up in the universe somewhere arguing with your alien friends.  You were looking for them your whole life.