Clarity of Hindsight
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Knowing what you now know, would you do it all over again? Whatever it is. Marry your spouse? Pursue your career? Buy that house? Go to that college? Enlist? Join the Peace Corps? End that relationship? Plant that crop? Invest in those stocks?
Novelists often make use of foreshadowing to hint at dramatic turns still to come. Movie makers use music in the same way. Da dum da dum da dumdadumdadum, from Jaws is perhaps the most familiar example. Life, on the other hand, doesn’t usually provide such advance notice.
Attention. Heart attack in 45 days. Attention. You’ll meet your life partner in this class. Attention. Your child will come home from school with pink-eye tomorrow. Attention. Your position will be downsized before the end of the quarter. Put it on your calendar.
Life isn’t a novel or a television show and doesn’t come with a musical score.
And really, aren’t we better off this way?
Our species would have died out long ago if prospective parents had absolute foreknowledge of middle-of-the-night fevers, toddler tantrums, and teen attitude.
What decisions would farmers make if they knew in advance that this is the year the drought would be too deep or that a tornado would crisscross the county, leaving their fields in ruins? Who can afford to throw away seed that will not produce a crop? But who can afford empty fields?
Deciding to marry is daunting enough knowing the divorce rate is about fifty-percent. What if you knew that the marriage you were contemplating was destined to be one of those that fail? Well, that seems like a no-brainer. You probably wouldn’t marry. But what if you knew it would fail after twenty years, but also knew, without a doubt, that during those twenty years you would grow into a strong and confident and capable adult, because of, not despite, the marriage? That you would meet and love people you never would have met outside of that marriage. That you would have children—precious, irreplaceable children—with that partner. And yes, then after twenty years, you would divorce. What then? With that sort of foreknowledge? With the dadumdadumdadum of impending divorce woven with lilts of lullaby and the triumphant strains of Pomp and Circumstance?
Without a musical score, without an author tossing in a bit of subtle or heavy-handed foreshadowing, we make our own ways through life. Some of us sense meaning in our lives and make life decisions accordingly. Some of us believe that if life has meaning at all, it is something we impose on it, and we make life decisions accordingly. Some of us wake up each morning and say, “I wonder what life will bring today!” and make life decisions accordingly. But none of us knows exactly what our life or even our day will hold, or how our decisions will shift and shape the hours and days and years yet to come.
Life, as far as we know it, is an unfolding of a series of endless possibilities. I believe that we would be paralyzed by any certain foreknowledge of how any one of those possibilities would ultimately unfold. And I believe that such foreknowledge would negate our freewill. I believe that Kierkegaard’s observation that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards” is a gift. It frees us to live, to determine our own paths, to take risks and to trust the future.
Because only hindsight is 20/20, because life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards, because most of us are never given a vision of the date engraved on our tombstones or the events of our deaths, we get to decide how we will move through our years and in what spirit:
Will we throw up our hands, saying, It doesn’t matter what I do because I will never know the outcome until it is too late anyway? Will we embrace what comes as a grand adventure, eager and curious about what meaning we may be able to glimpse near the end of our days, looking back upon our lives? Will we trust that there is a thread pulling us along and stringing together the hidden meaning of our days, and, resting on that trust, move deliberately, thoughtfully through our years, pausing at strategic times to listen and watch before staying the course or choosing a different path?
There may be blessing in each of these choices. Only I can know which is my way forward. Only you can know which is your way forward. But we can support one another in our choices. We can tell the stories and speculate about the meanings. And we can offer thanks that in the mystery of life’s never-ending unfolding, possibility abounds for redemption, for surprise, for joy, for love’s irresistible embrace.
- Clarity of Hindsight - July 1, 2013
