There are a lot of important things a man wants to accomplish in his lifetime, many goals he sets for himself. And when he looks back, he wants to be satisfied knowing he did the best he could. The last thing he wants to have is regret.

Though I’m just a college freshman, when I look back on my 19 years, I too experience this emotion. I was never able to grow a beard, and I think I would have liked that.

Before I am the butt of even more jokes than I already am, allow me to explain myself. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been excited about growing facial hair. I’d see these big guys walking around looking like Moses or something and I’d think, yeah, that’s gonna be me. I guess you could say it was a goal of mine: go to college, get married and grow a beard.

In middle school, I played little league baseball. We had this kid on our team who lived on some farm out in the country. Though he looked like he should have been playing a banjo on a bridge somewhere, I looked up to him because he had a beard. I’m not talking peach fuzz here; I mean the real thing. There was a full-fledged bush growing on his face, not to mention a jungle under his armpits.

This got me excited because I knew that facial hair couldn’t be far off. I was the same age as this Samsonite on my team; it wouldn’t take long before my beard would come in, right?

Sadly, it never grew. Oh, of course I got the standard four whiskers on the bottom of my chin that every boy gets at puberty. You know the ones I’m talking about, guys. There were only four of them, but you let them grow as long as you could. And it didn’t matter how many people thought you were ugly — they weren’t coming off because they were proof that you were a man.

But here I am, 19 years of age, still complaining that I can’t grow a beard. What’s the problem? I know it’s not the age. I have a friend who could pass for Sasquatch. He gets a regular five o’clock shadow and I don’t even have a five-year shadow.

I thought maybe there was some trick, some steps I could follow to grow more. So I checked out a couple of those health magazines for men: Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Men’s Health and Fitness. The problem is, these magazines only have three types of stories. And they’re always the same: how to eat better, ten easy steps to better abs and how to go longer in bed. Nothing really helps me there.

Then I thought that maybe I hadn’t given my facial hair enough time to come in. I’d been shaving every other day since I was about 16, not because I really needed it, just because I thought it was cool.

So during dead week and finals week last semester, I let myself go. And at the end of two weeks without shaving, I had a beard, if you could call it that. It was the ugliest beard I had ever seen. First of all, it was a dull red color, which made me want to puke. And second, it was really patchy. I had a patch of whiskers under both ears, a fairly hairy chin, and a dirt mustache. Yet the skin between my ear patches and my chin was as smooth as a baby’s butt. Needless to say, I decided a beard was no longer an option for me.

This was hard for me. It took me awhile to accept the fact that a lifelong goal of mine was not going to be met. I was just not a hairy guy, and I regretted that.

And then my friend told me that facial hair does not come by itself. Traveling with it is all the hair that grows in less desirable places. Places like your ears, the tops of your toes, or the back of your neck. I’ve seen people with hair in their ears; I want no part of that.

Then I started looking on the bright side, as you know I always do. There are quite a few benefits of not being able to grow hair. For instance, I don’t have to worry about only having one eyebrow. I don’t have to worry about my girlfriend asking me to have my back electrolysized. And I don’t have to worry about being mistaken for Sasquatch, not that that’d be a bad thing.

So I no longer regret not being able to grow a beard. I’m glad, because regret is a terrible feeling to have. It often stems from worrying too much and not doing enough. I guess I realized that there are more important things in life to worry about and more important things to do than shave.

Which I rarely do.

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Jackson Lashier is a freshman in journalism and mass communication from Marshalltown.