In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig spends a lot of pages in, what he calls, intellectual high ground, the mountaintops. It's necessary for him to fully articulate his philosophy of quality, but he eventually admits that while the high ground, above the timberline, is interesting and valuable, it does very little good for those of us living in the valley.
Maybe it's a misunderstanding on my part of Zen, but I'm not sure how much I can agree with the ideals of detachment and existing in the moment. A trans-temporal awareness may be precisely what gives us our personhood. If we were looking for instruction on how to prevent regret, or personal suffering and the like, we'd be better to look to the animals than the Zen monks. I was just watching this goofy news segment about a dog that had it's leg shot off. A week later it's bouncing around on three legs, happy as can be. No nightmares about the fanatic gunman, no concerns that, with this new disability, he'll be unable to live out his goals. The dog will be inconvenienced for the rest of it's life, but it won't suffer.
Maybe all of those things that Buddhism would have you abandon are what make you a person.
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