Let’s Talk About | Hindsight

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Recently I’ve been thinking (too much) about hindsight.

It’s a word that keeps popping up in my mind for no apparent reason.

Tim Kreider said that:

“…[hindsight] resembles averted vision, a phenomena familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it’s also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the “real” stars, those cataclysms taking place in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past.”

“The light of the untouchable past” – I like that. To me, that’s definitely what hindsight is. Despite, perhaps, us knowing this in our heads, knowing it for ourselves is different.

How often to do say things like “in hindsight, I wouldn’t have done it that way”? We look back on events and times in our lives and we wonder ‘what if?’ We wonder about what would have happened had we chosen a different path, or picked out a different route. Perhaps we get anxious about if we did the right thing, or if there was really a right and wrong way to do things at all.

The most likely ‘in hindsight’ thing you’ve said in the last week or so is probably around what you say. Perhaps you’ve had a conversation with someone that day and you think ‘wow. I should not have said that’, or it’s midnight and your brain is full of awesome things you could have said but didn’t think of them in time.

The biggest thing for me at the moment is change in leadership. When someone changes roles it can be a fantastic thing, but it can also make you realise the things you liked about the previous person. Perhaps you were a bit bitter about the ways things were going, but then when someone else steps up to take over you realise, in hindsight, that actually the first person did those things for a reason, and they were actually good things, and you should have appreciated them more as they happened.

Hindsight is a funny thing. I don’t know if I like it, but it’s there and it regularly pops into my head. Maybe it’s best to think about that ‘light of the untouchable past’ as a way to grow, to move forward, to learn, but also to be aware of things that are happening right now so as not to spend too much time in the future thinking ‘in hindsight I should have…’.

Let’s talk about it. What about you? How often do you think ‘In hindsight…’? 

Image from Unsplash, by Boram Kim.