Hindsight is king, foresight is a beggar

A cousing of mine called me to say that her father (my uncle), who had been suffering from fever for a week, was hospitalised. His kidneys were failing, due to infection "Should we have admitted him a few days earlier"? she asked. " Don't even think about it. Your father is sick, he's going to be in hospital for a few days, and you need a lot of mental and physical energy to deal with the illness. If you start thinking in hindsight, you are headed for trouble. Conserve your energies, and concentrate on what needs to be done, rather than what could have been done". She agreed, and blocked out these thoughts and went ahead with the treatment. A week later, the my uncle was discharged from the hospital. She called me to thank me and told me that throughtout the hospitalisation, many times her mind raised this question "What if I had admitted him earlier"?, but she remembered what I had told her, and it helped her to focus on the present moment and avoid distress.



It is a fact of life that when it comes to hindsight, or looking back at life, all of us are kings and queens. There is rarely a person who cannot look back in time and see his or her mistakes. All of us would live our lives a little differently if we could go back and change the past. But obviously, this cannot be done. But what we can surely do, is that whenever such thoughts of "What if" come to our minds, we can be aware and can deliberately remove or avoid these thoughts, knowing that these thoughts will only deplete us of our happiness and our mental energies. If we get caught up frequently in these "What if " scenarios, we are sure to have very little energies and strenght, to deal with the present moment situations. The only benefit of looking back into the past is that it might help us to deal with a similar situation a little better, if such a similar situation occurs in the future. Otherwise, thinking back in hindsight is an exercise in futility.



However, if we could have the same clarity with regard to our foresight, that would really be a boon to us. Unfortunatley, most of us are beggars, when it comes to foresight. Not only can we not see the future, if someone were to tell us that we are heading for trouble in the future, we would immediately get defensive and disregard this warning. We can't forsee the future and we will not let others tell us too. We are really beggars when it comes to the future.



Since we cannot be kings of foresight, and since all of us want to excel in whatever we do, we take the easy way out, and keep going back to the past, and making all sorts of judgements about our actions and those of others. And since our judgements regarding the past are highly likely to be correct, we are usually very adept at this. We emerge winners in this venture. But the amount of damage this sort of thinking does, the amount of energy and creativity that we lose, and the amount of guilt and agony that we suffer, the loss of good health and sleep that happens, by re-examinaing the past, is definitely not worth the effort.



Our minds are so programmed that they are constantly taking us into the past, especially to areas which we think may be mistakes, and keep re-opening old wounds. To get rid of this phenomenon effectively, one must identify what one feels is a mistake, and then consciously try and forgive the person responsible for it---it might be ourselves or it might be someone else. Only when we forgive and let go is there hope that our mind will not go back to the past, again and again. To be in the present moment, it is necessary to forget about hindsight or returning to the past. And that is possible only when we forgive and forget.

Try and be the reverse----a king in foresight and a beggar in hindsight. Life will be a breeze--full of fun and happiness.