GREENER PASTURES: Hindsight can seem to Curse as well as Bless.

Hindsight can seem to curse as well as to bless. It can demoralize as well as instruct us. Foresight is a mere educated guess, and remains susceptible to error and the fickle turnings of the unexpected. We need to have faith that we will learn from, get through and find good in whatever comes.

Whenever we reflect on our past, we do so with a decided attitude toward it. Neutrality is an illusion. Our attitude determines how we see what we remember. And our memory itself is selective and not to be completely trusted; it will play back only those selections we want to remember. When we look back, we do so either in a positive or negative frame of mind. We are geared to see the good or the reprehensible, perhaps to find grounds either for solace or for guilt, for thankfulness or regret, for forgiveness or resentment.

Whatever you look to see, you will likely find in abundance. Want to examine your failures? They are there. Your successes? They are there as well.

The only genuine mistake you make in life is the one from which you learn nothing. The truth is, even if you could go back, though you might not make the same mistakes as before, you would probably make different ones.

I remember a talk by a psychotherapist during a workshop on counseling people through divorce and remarriage. He took the bold risk of sharing the story of his own divorce and remarriage, and of relating to us more than we wanted to know, for the sake of our instruction. He explained in detail the whys of his divorce, from his perspective at least. Hindsight was proving instructive yet painful, since he could not go back to change what happened.

Then he turned the corner and began telling us, also in greater detail than we cared to know, about his second marriage. He concluded that, though he no longer had the specific problems he listed for us in his previous marriage, he had a new batch of unexpected problems in his current one.

He confessed that if he would have known then what he knew now, he never would have gotten divorced. He said, “I’m no better off, and I have emotional scars from my divorce I’ll have to carry for the rest of my life.” Nevertheless, he said he had no desire to go back, and that he had forgiven himself and his former wife for all that led to the failure of their marriage.

I frequently commiserate with another regarding issues of the past. Perhaps it is someone going through a divorce, looking at what he could have done differently to save the relationship. Maybe it is a widow regretting words not spoken or things not done.

Yet who of us has said or done everything we could in one or another relationship? When can we say we truly have done our best, given our all? I tell others that, though they may not have done everything, they did enough. I remind them to live in the present, and let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.