Remorse: Just One More

If I am going to feel remorse in life, I want it to be not for doing something wrong, but for not doing enough right. Or in other words, if I must feel sorrow, I want it to be because I tried to do good and came up short. In that case, I would know that I was trying, and that my heart truly desired the right thing, even though my inadequacies prevented full achievement.

I recently watched Schindler's List. Powerful movie. I would watch the entire thing again, just to see the final scene. Oskar Schindler, as he is leaving the Jews he saved (over 1100), starts to break down saying "I could have saved more," "I wasted so much money," "I could have gotten more," etc. But as he sinks into tears, he says "Just one more...Just one more..." Through the course of the movie, he transformed from a profiteering businessman into a humanist. At the end, this is a man who had spent his entire fortune and put himself in a very dangerous situation to keep these Jews alive. And after saving so many and coming to the end of that situation, even after the incredible good he had done, he begins to realize all of the places where if he did a little more or tried a little harder, he could have saved even more lives.

I know that I am going to be lazy at times, that I may squander an hour or two that could be put to use profiting another. There will be tasks at which I try hard, but perhaps later down the road I will realize that if I had tried harder, it would have made all of the difference to one. Hopefully that recognition now can minimize such wasted time and energy and help me to make more fully the difference that I must make in this world. The individual life is so precious, from Gospel, secular, or any other perspective worth viewing life through.

Just one more...if I could only save just one more...