My inner life summons me. The request arrives in vague desire form; one word translates the desire, flashing repeatedly - write. It does not stop until I comply.

It’s a virgin day to deflower. Echoes from previously ravished virginities promise interference questioning this day's virginity. I could declare, "This is the first day of my life." but the cemetery where days are interred prove the sentiment incorrect.

I am victim of innocence, soiled by ignorance and compromised by learning.

If this communicates a sadness, your perception is correct. My wise self cannot change what my ignorance has created. Once something has been etched into experience, it is too late, it cannot be altered. It joins the multitudes of seconds in the cemetery of days. My wisdom’s power is exclusive affecting only my choices that are pulsating, birthing. Anything else is inaccessible.

It cannot be otherwise. I am a perpetual process interacting with the energy of change. I am a student, a pawn in life’s game of chance and change. I have free will to choose the next second’s exposure but under closer inspection, with the many forces influencing, any choice’s freedom is limited.

Learning better delivers a piercing twist my ancestors have named regret. Undoubtedly, knowing - I cannot know better before I know it – helps, but it does not release me completely. The sadness teaches and tortures me by replaying the damage my ignorance continues to cause.

Accepting what can never be changed takes a minute or two.

The adages arrive – you reap what you sow, what goes around comes around and every action has a relative equal reaction elevates my grief.

Missing from this wisdom is the antidote; the realization that regret paralyzes and only the aiming of one’s focus at what is next rescues me from its prison.

Now that I have new knowledge, now that change has taught me how much more I need to learn, where can I best use it?

My education has power solely in this present moment. Its competency is bound by the space where a second that has joined the past is replaced. It is the action that offers me an opportunity to switch from victim to powerful creator.

I am revolving in a cycle between victim and creator. My regret, controlled by the sadness of realizing the depth of damage, holds me far too long.

It is the paradox of having an increasing consciousness that is continually awakened by experience.