The Cycle of Non-Regret
Keynote Address
Black Parents & Family Appreciation Commencement Weekend Ceremony
Dr. Afia Ofori-Mensa
Assistant Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and Director of Undergraduate Research
Assistant Professor of Comparative American Studies and Africana Studies
Oberlin College
Oberlin, Ohio
Sunday, May 21, 2017
Agooo!
I am so happy to be here with you, to look around this beautiful room and see it made even
more beautiful by your presence. I would like to begin with gratitude, as is my custom. I want to thank
the Black Parents and Family Appreciation Committee—Aliyah Abu-Hazeem, Candice Raynor,
Caroline Jackson Smith, Kristen Reynolds, RaShelle Peck, Toni Myers, and Zoë Davidson—for their
kind invitation to speak. I want to thank our distinguished guests, Dr. Darren Walker and Dr. Lonnie
Bunch, for joining us today. And I want to thank all of you for traveling to be with us in community at
this special time as well. I am honored and humbled to be sharing my thoughts with our graduates in
your presence.
A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my dearest friend. A year prior, she had met
her partner—a man she’d known casually two jobs and one multi-state move before. A chance
Facebook encounter had brought them back together. Both fans, they found themselves at Prince
dance parties on the same night, on opposite sides of the country—she in New York, he in LA—the
weekend after Prince died. To the backdrop of his music, they fell in love.
Energized by this change in her life, she moved back to the Bay Area—fulfilling a dream she
had held for years ever since she graduated from college at UC Berkeley, but in part to be nearer to
him, too. He called his mother in Seattle and told her that he had found the woman he was going to
marry. After years of imagining that being single was her lot in life, she slowly opened up to the idea
that she had found the person she’d spend her life with. They talked about the wedding and the kids
they would have. But California is a big state; LA and San Francisco are not so close together. And just
days shy of their one-year anniversary, he texted her to say he didn’t think it was going to work.
As she cycled through stages of grief and loss, she and I talked on the phone for hours. She told
me that she regretted not telling him her feelings more, because she was afraid that he would be scared
away. She told me that she regretted even feeling anxious, instead of being present with him and
enjoying herself in the relationship. And then she paused in her enumeration of regrets, recalling
something I had told her years prior about how, in college, I had eradicated regret from my life. She
asked me to share again how I had done it, and I knew then that’s what I would talk about today.
There are two formative lessons that I learned in my time as an undergraduate, one about regret
and the other about fear and love. As you come to the end of your time as an undergraduate today, I
want to share them with you—that you may leave this place, where we have come to know each other,
considering those lessons as well.
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Dr. Afia Ofori-Mensa
Regret
The second semester of my first year in college, I took a class called Religions of the West. I
had applied and been accepted straight into the business school at my alma mater, but recognizing by
spring registration that accounting and finance and operations information management were not for
me, I dipped my toe into the offerings in the College of Arts and Sciences and came upon this course in
the Religious Studies department. I remember sitting outside the testing room for my first midterm in
this first humanities course I had ever taken in college. I was frantically reviewing my notes from the
textbook and lectures, when a guy I had befriended in the class walked up beside me, leaned over as if
to tell me a secret, and whispered, “If you don’t know it by now / You will never, never, never know it
/ Oooooooooo!”
I remember walking out of the testing room afterward, feeling good about how I had done, and
then getting the grade later and not feeling so good. Staring at the letter on the Blue Book that had so
quickly recast how I felt about myself, I started to regret that I hadn’t studied more, and sooner. Then,
some other part of my mind intervened. I don’t recall exactly how, but I do remember clearly that I
decided on that very day never to experience regret again.
In order to make that happen, I set about coming up with a plan. (Those of you who know me
will not be surprised to learn that at all.) And so over the course of the coming years I developed, in
self-reflection and conversations with others, what I came to call The Cycle of Non-Regret, in five
repeating steps:
1. Make the best decision you can with the information you have at the time.
2. Resist the temptation to judge past-you with the information that present-you received after
that decision was made.
3. Recognize that you are who you are, you can only be you, because everything in your life has
happened in precisely the way and exactly the order in which it has happened.
4. Love yourself.
5. Trust that future-you can handle the results of whatever decisions present-you makes.
I will tell you how that has looked in my life since then.
STEP 1: Make the best decision you can with the information you have at the time.
I was raised the first American-born daughter in a Ghanaian immigrant family. My parents were
strict. Dating was, therefore, utterly unfathomable. Until my senior year of high school, that is, when
this young brother whom I had met in debate class started to show an interest in me. He was the first
person I ever thought I was going to marry. That was largely because the complete lack of romantic
attention that I had received growing up in that predominantly white suburb of Detroit, led me to
believe that he was my only chance. We were together for six years, long distance when I went away to
Philadelphia, all the way through college. My senior year, I applied to four out of eight PhD programs
in California, hoping to use grad school to fulfill my fantasies of living on the West Coast. When I told
him, he said to me, “Just when you have the chance to come back home, you’re going to go even
farther away instead?” It did not occur to me then that he could have moved, too. So I delayed my
California dreams and decided to spend the next five plus years of my life at the University of
Michigan. It was the best decision I could make at the time, for a relationship that I still believed to be
my only chance at marriage and kids and the future that I wanted. A year and a half in, we broke up.
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Dr. Afia Ofori-Mensa
STEP 2: Resist the temptation to judge past-you with the information that present-you received
after that decision was made.
Every winter, I was tempted to regret that I hadn’t gone to the University of Southern
California instead, to judge younger-me for having moved back home instead of to LA, because of a
boyfriend who did not have the capacity to prioritize my needs over his fears. But there in Ann Arbor,
on the first day of a photo essay class my first week of grad school, I met the woman whose story I told
you about earlier, who would become my dearest friend. I became involved in the labor union that
radicalized my politics. I befriended all the smart and stylish people of color in my graduate program
who would turn out to be some of the most loving friends and important colleagues in my life to this
day. I reconnected with individuals from high school and became closer to them than I had ever been
before. I invested time and effort and the benefits of proximity into growing into my adult relationships
with my parents and older sister and two younger brothers. I got my PhD, and I applied and won the
postdoctoral fellowship at Oberlin College—available only to University of Michigan graduates—that
brought me here.
STEP 3: Recognize that you are who you are because everything in your life has happened in
precisely the way and exactly the order in which it has happened.
In the spring of my second year at Oberlin, almost exactly five years ago, I got hit by a car while
walking across the street. It was a warm season, like the one we had this year, one of those 80-degree
March days in Northeast Ohio that seemed to portend the end of the world by global warming.
Thursday afternoon had come, I had finished teaching my last class of the week, and I decided that I
would change into a t-shirt and flip flops, and walk down the road to pay my cable bill.
I was in the crosswalk when it happened, three-quarters of the way across the street. I had
noticed a car coming from my right and kept walking, asserting, as was my habit, my pedestrian rightof-way in the face of Ohio drivers who never seemed to know what a crosswalk was for. The car was
zooming, but I had seen that many times before—the speed-up and then the hard brake right at the
edge of the white lines. By the time I realized this one wasn’t going to stop, I was directly in the middle
of the lane. My mind launched into calculations: if I went forward or back, my foot might land under
one of the tires and be crushed. If I just stood there, facing the sidewalk, I wouldn’t have the footing to
stay upright. And so I whirled toward the car and put my hands out to brace myself against the hood.
My lower body was still whirling when the driver hit me. My upper body was looking him straight in
the face. He was a white man, maybe in his early thirties, balding. We stared at each other for some
moments in shock, until an older Black gentleman on the sidewalk called out, “Are you okay?” I looked
down at the pavement. One of my flip flops had broken. “You need to call the police,” said the
gentleman on the sidewalk, and when I hesitated, he said it again: “You need to call the police.” “If that
had been me driving,” he added the second time, “they woulda been hauled my ass to jail already.”
The police officer who arrived was a man of German descent, I would learn, just like the one
who had driven into me. When filling out the police report, the officer lowered the speed of 30 miles
per hour, that the driver himself had admitted, down to 25 miles per hour to match the speed limit, and
then did not give the driver a ticket. To justify his decision, the officer gestured obliquely toward me,
sitting in a chair at the Cable Co-op with an ice pack on my ankle, and said, “Nobody was hurt.”
Neither he nor the driver would ever know that a friend had to drive me to the emergency
room the next day; that the following week, when I went back to teaching, I would lift my arm to try to
write on the board and, failing under the weight of a single piece of chalk, I would begin to cry in front
of a class of 21 students. They would never know that I would require months of physical therapy,
chiropractic care, acupuncture, personal training, and therapeutic massage in order to be able to sit in a
chair for longer than a few minutes at a time; that I would miss my 10-year college reunion because my
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Dr. Afia Ofori-Mensa
body could not tolerate the 50-minute flight to Philly; that one evening, foreseeing no end to my pain, I
would think for the briefest moment that I would be better off dead than living in this container for
misery that did not feel like my own body anymore.
STEP 4: Love yourself.
But instead I went to therapy. And I lived. And a community of care grew up around me. These
days, five years later, I still startle when a car approaches me while I’m crossing the street. I’ve taken to
paying all of my cable bills online. My right knee tells me, within 48-hours accuracy, when it’s going to
rain. My left wrist hurts when I’ve been typing a lot, my right elbow when I’ve been using a mouse. My
lower back still burns when I sit for long periods of time, but now I can make it a few hours—
depending on the chair. I’ve learned to ask for help without thinking of it as a sign of weakness. I’ve
also learned that weakness is okay. I’ve learned to take help when it’s offered and to respond to the
wisdom of my body when it’s telling me to stop. I’ve learned to accept that, as young as I am, my body
may never go back to the way it was before 4:30pm on that warm Thursday in March. I’ve learned to
celebrate every moment that I feel okay.
In dark times, when my joints ache and I am tempted to regret that I stepped out into the street
that day, I remind myself that I could not have known. I think about the me that I have become—how
I have developed empathy for others in pain—and I find a way to be thankful instead. That is because I
love myself, just exactly as I am. I love my strong body that stopped a car coming for me at 30 miles
per hour. I love my sharp mind that came up with a plan to minimize the vehicle’s impact in a split
second. I love my ancestors’ spirits that shielded me from even greater harm that day. I love my new,
more empathetic heart that has connected me with all the people I’ve come to know since then, not in
spite of that accident but precisely because it happened.
STEP 5: Trust that future-you can handle the results of whatever decisions present-you makes.
Last Friday, I went to my college reunion—the one I had to miss 5 years ago because I could
barely sit upright—and I danced all weekend. I stayed in Philly for a few extra days and spent my time
talking and reflecting with friends who now live there, folks I know from college, from grad school, and
from my time here—from every stage of my life since I did away with regret. One of those
conversations was with a former Oberlin student, now a friend of mine who, like so many of you, was
wise and thoughtful and kind and self-reflective. He had just come back to the country the day before,
after traveling in Ghana and Morocco and Spain. The last time I’d talked with him, he had been trying
to determine if he should take a steady job in Minneapolis or leave for awhile to travel parts of the
world he’d never seen. He had been trapped in indecision by fears about the consequences of either
choice, and how they would affect him and others he cared about.
Six months later, his mind and his sense of self were transformed. He told me something he
had realized, and it became the fifth step in my Cycle of Non-Regret, the last piece that joined “Love
Yourself” back to the beginning with “Make the Best Decision with the Information You Have.” “I’ve
had to learn to trust future-me,” said my former student, “To recognize that any decisions
present-me makes, future-me can handle whatever situation I set up for myself.”
I told him that was hard for me, that as much as I had mastered the other steps, I did not
always trust my future self to get me out of a tough place. That is because there had been so many
times in the past that I had stayed in a situation even when it had become uncomfortable or unhealthy
for me—like the time I had gone straight back to teaching the next class session after getting hit by a
car, or the time I had stayed in that relationship with my high-school boyfriend for six years.
A few days later, back in Oberlin, I told another former student, who had returned to town for
Commencement, about the conversation I’d had with the other former student in Philadelphia. I love
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Dr. Afia Ofori-Mensa
this time of year of reunions and commencements, because of all the opportunities for sharing and
reflection that it creates. When I got to the part of the story that was about how I wasn’t sure that I
trusted future-me, this former student said, “But you’re a different you than you were before. You have
all the knowledge and experiences that you didn’t have then, and so maybe this time, you would make
choices that are better for you.” It was a simple moment of profound wisdom, over frozen custard at
Krieg’s. Their words sent me right back into the Cycle of Non-Regret and that moment early in college
when I learned that I had the power to decide to remove something from my life that wasn’t serving
me.
Love
On the other end of college, in my final year, just as I was about to leave as you are now, the
second formative lesson revealed itself in another simple moment of profound wisdom. A friend of
mine who was in my poetry circle—because it was the late 90s, and I was a Black college student in
Philly, so of course I was in a poetry circle—said to me that there are two categories in the world under
which all emotions fall: love and fear. Like mass, they cannot occupy the same space at the same time;
you can act out of only one or the other. The aim in life, then, is always to make decisions only out of
love: to choose something out of love for other people, not out of fear of what they will think. To
choose something out of love for yourself, not out of fear of how it will turn out.
This has been my guiding worldview since then. Bringing the two lessons together, I have come
to understand that regret is fear projected backward. Do not act in fear. Instead, make the best
decision you can with the information you have at the time. Resist the temptation to judge past you
with the information that present you received after that decision was made. Recognize that you are
who you are, you can only be you, because everything in your life has happened in precisely the way and
exactly the order in which it has happened. Love yourself. Trust that future-you will be capable of
handling whatever situation present-you sets up. And in the moments when you find any of those
things too hard to do, surround yourself with people who believe in you until, through the sheer
strength of their love, you are reminded that you can believe in yourself, too.
In conversation with my friend after her breakup, when I was talking her through the steps of
the Cycle of Non-Regret, she asked me, “But how will I know that I’ve made the best decision that I
can?” I told her that the best decisions are the ones made in love. Trust is a form of love. And courage
is what comes when you trust your future self. So if regret is fear projected backward, then courage is
love projected forward.
You, Black Oberlin Class of 2017, are the lovers and the healers. You are, as Dr. Walker said, the
firefighters. You came here just after an especially trying time in 2013, when messages of hate were
being strewn across campus. You arrived at a moment when communal trauma had given way to
personal pain, and people were turning against themselves and each other. But you were the artists, the
scientists, the caregivers, the leaders, the community-builders who used your talents to heal us—to
remind this place that activism and kindness are not mutually exclusive. Now you are leaving here in an
especially trying time that extends far beyond our campus, when messages of hate are being strewn
across our lives, across our nation and our world every day. As your gifts have grown and continue to
grow, I believe ever more in your ability to heal us now and into the future.
Be courageous. Be the firefighters. We need you. We always will.
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Dr. Afia Ofori-Mensa