The Insight of Hindsight

“Today is the tomorrow that you worried about yesterday” proclaimed the cross-stitch sign in the dentist’s office. That’ll make your brain itch. While you’re scratching your head about it, here’s another way to consider time: “Today will be the yesterday you’ll try to forget about tomorrow.”

We are forever living existentially between our hindsight and our foresight. If we could measure our hindsight, we would probably all have 20/20 vision. And we use such sight to discover who we are. I am the accumulation of years of experiences. My character is formulated by the building blocks of days and years of choices made and people known and books read and events that occurred. Through this process, I began to obtain wisdom from all the failures as well as the successes of bygone days.

Some things in our past are best forgotten, but the forgetting mechanism in our psyche doesn’t always work. We are stuck with our mistakes, even though they are not the stuff of the stories we recount to our children about the good old days. We prefer to recall those brief shining moments of the Camelots we’ve experienced rather than the sloughs of despond that muddied our feet. Thus we work at assimilating our weaker moments and bad judgements and moral mistakes into a kind of quasi persona that really isn’t our true selves.

After several years of playing “If only I had…”, we bar the doors of the past, shut the windows of pain and betrayal in order to experience a form of myopia which allows us to live with ourselves in spite of our memory. When we short-circuit our hindsight in such ways, we develop nearsightedness that doesn’t see too far beyond the immediate struggle to maintain our own equilibrium. And we develop shortsightedness about the future. We lose the vision that used to give us hope and courage. We discover the wisdom of the prophet that a people without a vision soon perish. We become very perishable persons, unable to cope with the slings and arrows of any misfortune past, present or future.

This pandemic seems to have caught the whole world off guard, and we are hard pressed to admit we knew in January that this was going to hit us hard. Illusions were spread throughout this land that this too would pass by spring, while another reality was biting us in the derriere so that today we are languishing as lambs to the slaughter. From the beginning, there was this lack of a vision — foresight derived from insight — that could have saved so many people and healed our lagging spirits. In retrospect, it’s quite easy to see that our political leaders became shortsighted and lacked any form of conviction and courage to do what was right.

One of the functions of faith is to give us insight. Insight from outside ourselves yet very much about ourselves, about living with others, about the world itself, about God, about grace. The amazing grace we used to sing about down at the church is rich with all kind of wisdom for the living of these days. Its sweetness is more than just how it sounds to the ears. It is also sweet to the eyes. “I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see.” And it has farsighted and everlasting tendencies: “When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.”