The Opportunity of Hindsight
Hindsight is 20/20, right?
Business leaders are often lauded for their “vision” or complain when they lack it, because the future seems unclear due to factors outside their control. But everyone agrees on one thing, that past events make a lot more sense when you can connect the dots from the perspective of reflection.
Each moment is in the process of becoming, but when events are cemented in the black-and-white reel of times past, you can make some conclusions. And there’s another saying for that: “those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Whether you accredit it to Churchill, Santayana, or Burke, the wisdom is the same. Why not benefit from that clarity of vision when it manifests?
The future is predicated upon what the present makes of the past. The present is a kind of precipice, and the feeling of being on the edge of one can be used to loosely describe the dizzying-ness that the present affords. With a multitude of directions, beliefs, and sentiments to take on, what’s your choice? It depends, in many ways, on your interpretation of history. But hindsight is never 20/20, because your interpretation of events will also be largely colored by your experience of the present. It’s rather a catch-22. The three are immeasurably entangled upon one another in a web of ties.
But looking deeply, one can glean some semblance of “truth” from past events through memories we may have had to suppress when we had first felt them in the “present of the past.” Perhaps we have even taken actions we regretted. But ex post facto, we can draw some conclusions. Like coming up with a “moral of the story” in your high school literature class, there are certainly some lessons we can draw from any story, history included.
The biggest lessons we must learn about ourselves are our most crippling weaknesses, and everyone has them. For most of us, these weaknesses are what our psyches laboriously attempt to hide from ourselves at any cost necessary, through consumerism, addiction, or any number of grave habits we can undertake. And breaking down the psychic underpinnings of that vision of the world we have constructed that obscures our ability to see through to our most core, debilitating weaknesses is going to feel like a scene out of one of DiCaprio’s most thrilling movies—Shutter Island.
One of the most memorable phrases in the movie, “live as a monster, or die as a good man” is illustrative here. Our assumptions and bad habits are what enable us to live as “monsters.” The protagonist in Shutter Island must make believe that he is a noble detective to hide the tragedy of what really occurred to him and his family, and continue “living.” But is the alternative death?
We can allow our “monsters” to die instead. Without some of the assumptions we may have lived with our entire lives, we may feel very comfortable—but looking back on our past and singling out some of these patterns that we would rather live without is the first step toward recovery. Change is the only constant, unless we get in its way. And to channel our lives to where we want it to go is the best way to recover from our past.
