Don’t get me wrong. I love Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” It is one of my signature songs at every karaoke party. (Except in the Philippines, where over the years people have come to blows, and worse, over this exact song. It is not a joke. Look it up.)
But the lyrics, if you take them seriously for even a second, may be some of the most diabolical ever written. Beautiful, the way the road to hell is said to be paved. No regrets in life? Really?
How can a man feel genuine remorse, ask for forgiveness, sit in honest contrition, if he insists he regrets nothing? As a Christian I will go further than uncomfortable. I find the sentiment diabolical. It is pride wearing the costume of freedom.
There is a bitter irony buried in the song’s own history. Paul Anka wrote the English words imagining Sinatra at the end of his life, looking back and refusing to bow to a single regret. Sinatra himself reportedly grew to dislike it, uneasy with how self-serving the message was. The man who made it immortal could feel the rot in it.
I, like most adults I know, carry many regrets. They pain me. And that pain is not my enemy. It is the very thing that sends me looking for answers, for repair, for grace.
Why Malta Brings the Regrets Back
Being back in Malta always makes these regrets more present. The light here has not changed in twenty years. The bells still ring across the rooftops on a Sunday morning, impossible to ignore. The island remembers things on my behalf, whether I want it to or not.
I think back to the years I lived here as a single father, freshly divorced, having had to leave the United States over visa problems I did not see coming. Raw. Hurt. Lonely. Six children to raise on my own, and a business to keep breathing at the same time.
I was not without help. My brother was on the island. Family made me feel welcome, and I am grateful for that to this day. But gratitude and regret are not enemies. They live in the same house.
The Things I Remember, And The Thing I Regret
I can still see it all.
The Sliema to Valletta ferry, the children leaning over the rail as Valletta rose gold and fortified out of the water, the spray catching them, the city looking like something out of a storybook.
The flat rocks below the Sliema front in the evening, where they would jump into the warm sea until the light went and I had to call them in.
Popeye Village at Anchor Bay, that tumble of painted wooden houses clinging to the cliffs, the kids running between them while I watched and pretended I was not exhausted.
Marsaxlokk on a Sunday, the harbour crowded with painted luzzu boats and their watchful eyes, the fish laid out on ice, a paper cup of something cold in every small hand.
Mdina at dusk, the Silent City, walking the old walls as the swifts wheeled overhead and the noise of the world fell away below us.
Beautiful photographs. But underneath every one of them there is a quieter memory. I was always moving. Always powering on.
Here is the regret, plainly. I wish I had stopped. Taken time out. Slowed right down and simply been with them, with nothing to prove and nowhere to be. I did exactly that later, in Ireland, and I watched what it gave them. Then the lease ended and we came back to Malta. Bad timing, again.
I believe that had I slowed down sooner, I could have helped them heal. I could have helped them feel less alone in a season when they were every bit as lonely as I was, and too young to say so.
So when I walk those same streets now, there is always a small sadness folded into the beauty. The island gives the memories back to me unedited.
The Two Lies About Regret
Over the years I have learned there are two lies a man can tell himself about his regrets, and both are seductive.
The first is Sinatra’s lie. Pretend there is nothing to regret. Stand tall, offer no apologies, declare that you did it your way and would not change a thing. It sounds like strength. It is armour bolted shut over a wound.
The second is the opposite lie. Drown in paralysing guilt. Replay the failures on a loop, punish yourself endlessly, fix nothing, help no one, and call the whole sorry performance humility.
Both are pride in disguise. The first refuses to kneel. The second kneels forever so it never has to get up and change.
The Honest Thing
The honest path runs straight between them, and it is narrow.
To acknowledge. To admit. To ask forgiveness. Then to stand up and live differently.
Malta, of all places, keeps pressing this on me, because Malta is built on churches. There is one at the end of nearly every street, and the greatest of them, St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, is a room designed to make a proud man feel small in the right way. You can sit in a quiet side chapel there and feel the centuries of people who came in carrying exactly what I carry, and who walked out lighter. The island that holds my regrets also offers the remedy for them.
Here is the moral I keep returning to. A life done “my way,” with no regrets, is not a life well lived. It is a life with the door bolted against the people we have hurt and against the God who waits to forgive us. The braver thing, and the far freer thing, is to look back without flinching, to name what we got wrong out loud, and to say the three hardest words a proud man knows. I was wrong. And then to let those words actually change how we live.
I cannot rewrite the Sliema ferry or the walls of Mdina. Those years are written. But I have younger children now, and a second chance to do the slow, unglamorous, present thing I did not do the first time. I take it more often than I used to. Not perfectly. But honestly.
Life is short and fleeting. One shot. I would rather spend it with my regrets named, confessed, and forgiven than spend it on a stage, microphone in hand, insisting to a room full of strangers that I would not change a single thing.
That song is a beautiful lie. Malta, every time I return, tells me the truth.
