No Regrets : Defining the Essence of a Man by the Things He’s Chosen Not to Do

CLAIRE WEINBERG,my travel agent, was reflecting the other day on things that she and her husband haven’t done. She specified four things. They have never bought a lottery ticket; they have never been camping; they have never had room service, and they have never used an automatic teller.

I couldn’t tell whether her attitude toward these lapses was one of regret, pride or, simply, wonder. At a certain age, one tends to review one’s life and worry that one has been passed by by the mainstream.

If we have led decent lives and have clear consciences, we are more likely to regret the things we haven’t done than those that we have. On the other hand, I have never used an automatic teller, and I don’t regret it. I am rather intimidated by such machines.

I did buy a lottery ticket that week when the payoff was up to $40 million or something close to that. It occurred to me that $40 million would actually change my life, though I wasn’t sure that $1 million or even $10 million would.

For a mere $1 million, I doubted that I would even quit my job, as most winners do. I was more interested in seeing what I would do with $40 million than with actually having it. I was curious about untapped urgings, about what changes in my character that great riches might work.

Fortunately, I never found out.

I have been camping and I have had room service. Given a choice, I’d take room service. I have never understood why anyone would deliberately resort to a Neanderthal life style for a weekend on the pretext of having fun. My idea of camping out is to order room service in the Santa Barbara Biltmore or some such retreat and lie in bed, watching while the waiter wheels a table into the room and lays out the white napery and the silver flatware, pours hot decaf, takes the lids off plates of scrambled eggs and bacon and then unfolds a copy of The Times.

If I were Mrs. Weinberg and her husband, I would certainly court an opportunity to have room service. Avoiding it is self-denial of the most Spartan sort.

I can’t think of many things I would like to do that I haven’t done. I have never owned a Porsche, an Alfa Romeo, a Ferrari or a Rolls-Royce, and I am not especially eager to. I have been to most of the capitals of the Western world, but I have never been to Asia. I have seen the Parthenon but not the Pyramids.

I have stood in battle; I have had a coronary bypass; I have fathered two children; I have published eight books; I have read half the works of Shakespeare; in my youth I was a 108-pound wrestling champion of the Whittier YMCA.

I never graduated from college; I have never learned to fly; I have never finished Will and Ariel Durant’s “Story of Civilization”; I have never been baptized; I have never made a parachute jump; I have never been divorced; I have never been invited to the White House by a President.

Most of the things I haven’t done I haven’t done because I didn’t want to (except being invited to the White House). There are a great many more things I don’t want to do than things that I do. That is perhaps the only serious difference between my wife and me. She is an adventurer. She will try almost anything. If there are any unexplored regions left in the upper Amazon, she would love to explore them. Her appetite and her energy are boundless. Also, she is fearless. She simply does not believe that anything bad can happen to her.

On the contrary, I am more timorous and contemplative. I’d rather sit in the comfort of my living room and see the Pyramids on TV than make that arduous trip to Cairo. I have no desire to ride a camel. I do not enjoy air travel. I do not want to see France from a balloon. I did enjoy our cruise up the Danube, but that was because there was nothing to do but lie in a deck chair and watch the castles go by.

But this morning, I got a Diet Coke out of a machine at the car wash. Maybe I could learn to operate an automatic teller.