Felix Obelix

For those who saw Felix Obelix on its southwesternly journey in March 2009, you may already be familiar with an interactive project I created called Best Decision/Biggest Regret. For those who didn’t see it, or didn’t understand it at the time, or have forgotten about it, the scoop is this:

I made a simple box and sign, and invited audience members in every city we toured to (Durham, Knoxville, Nashville, Hot Springs, Dallas and Austin), to ponder two questions: what is the best decision you ever made in your life? & what is your biggest regret? Willing audience members – and there were many! – wrote each their decisions and regrets on small pieces of paper and put them in the box.  It was then/is now my intent to write a song (or maybe multiple, since there was so much source material) using only the words on the pieces of paper as the song lyrics.

We ripped open the box on the last leg of the tour home, somewhere in Georgia, and read all the decisions and regrets aloud, while the trees and fields and highway blurred past us.  Some thoughts, in no particular order:

• I had always suspected, and this project confirmed, something fundamental about the notion of regret: that more of us regret the things we DIDN’T do, rather than the things we DID do.  Many, if not most of the regrets had some version of a negative in it, like: ”I didn’t tell So-and-So sooner that I loved her…” or “I never did such and such activity…”  The one big exception to this rule is having ill-begotten sex of some kind: “I slept with someone I really shouldn’t have slept with…” or “I slept with my best friend.”  So here’s my big advice, culled from this project and from all the fine folks who helped us come to this truth: if you want to do something, do it.  You’ll regret it if you don’t.  If you want to do someone, don’t.  You’ll regret that even more.
• I was struck that some of the regrets didn’t have to be regrets at all.  “I never played soccer” or “I threw away a portfolio of my designs…”  I say this with great gentleness to those of you who wrote these, because I know dreams are touchy things, and deferred or dead dreams even touchier: it’s not too late to play soccer.  Go get a soccer ball.  I know it won’t be playing soccer in the big leagues, I know that dream might be gone, but everywhere in America people are playing soccer.  You must have loved the sport at some point, enough for it to eat at you that you never got to play it how you wanted to.  But you can still play.  If your regret involved something you didn’t do that you still have the power to do, then you have the power to eradicate your biggest regret.  What bigger power do you want in life?
• Regrets and decisions generally could be classified in categories: love & sex; education; career; finding a sense of place and home; family life; religion; self-improvement or self-awareness; goofy fake childish ones that I’m not going to take seriously.  What does this tell me?  That we’re all basically concerned with the same set of life materials.  It’s how we manipulate those materials that makes our lives unique.

I may make a piece of visual art with these scribbled-down confessions, but for now, feast on these as a teaser: