SHAME

"You should feel ashamed for what you did (or failed to do)?"

No you shouldn't.

Shame is an emotion...a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.  But it is a misbegotten emotion, predicated as it is on the failure to acknowledge two fundamental aspects of man's nature:

     (1)  man has free will, and

     (2)  man always acts to enrich his life.

People feel ashamed when they haven't lived up to a behavior standard (generally set for them by other people).  But standards of future behavior are but goals, not chains of bondage.  As such, they are subject to the following facts of life:

*  every personal goal entails time to reach
*  the future is not yet reality
*  you are not yet the person you will be in the future

*  until a goal is reached it has not been reached
*  your free will cannot be programmed by others or even by you
*  your failure to act in accordance with a standard may be evidence that the standard is an incorrect or undesirable one
*  humans`are not omniscient.

Any reason to punish yourself with shame?  Only if you ignore one or more of these realities and choose to answer Shakespeare's question this way:  "Both.  I want to both be and not be...human".