Hindsight is the time machine
Hindsight: Vision 20-20 or trickery of the mind?
Sometimes, I feel hindsight and afterthought have become friends with me, unfailingly calling on me when foresight and insight get busy with deserving subjects.
I have also a reason to believe they’re morning people. After all, they show up punctually after every hazy night of thoughtlessness and impropriety, walking me out of the haze and making me face the sunny clarity of the “morning after”. Like good friends, they never really knock but walk in with an authority that comes only with trust and confidence.
I do think they trust me with their lessons and advice and I am luckier for them.
This morning, too, they came. But unlike the tiptoeing of initial days, today, they barged in and shook me out of the reverie of last night.
They told me something I knew but never perhaps understood in its entirety. They told me how beautifully life’s been embellished and how I must learn to appreciate the effort that’s gone into it.
How today, the life that I am experiencing with all its bells and whistles, is a series of moments put end to end. How I must know and absorb every one of these blessed moments with a sobriety of the knowledge that none of it would last for ever.
Hindsight and afterthought also made understand how lucky I am to be actualising some of my dreams: a chunk of time for self and its tremendous possibilities; a new, exciting location and a chance to explore it; and most importantly and most thankfully, an honest friend and a guide in a life-partner.
In the several blurry, maze-like moments of last night, I lost my way and missed the marvel of each one of these wonderful realities. I swayed, stumbled and then simply gave up; behaved a fool and cried like a brat.
Do I feel awful? Yes, I do — not for having being beaten by my own lofty expectations of the world but for harbouring those many-sized expectations in the first place. Will I change for good? Can’t make a promise on that but yes, I want to change for the better.
Without the crazy baggage of expectations and “has been”, I want to travel light. Just before they left for the day, hindsight and afterthought gave me an emergency helpline, should I want direction earlier than they can attend to me.
They directed me to *you*. Help me find some insight if not foresight.
