In Hindsight..

There are a lot of experiences in life that you can not feel the full extent of until some time has passed since the experience itself. There is so much to be said for people who can learn their lessons quickly, or better yet the people that just "know better" ahead of time. I'm not one of them. I have always learned my lessons the hard way. I don't intentionally do so but my nature drives me to it. I have often felt I am a strong person, still, I don't feel the need to test my strengths with heavy-weighted issues.



I am learning that often times, I will not learn my lesson until much time has passed and sometimes not even the first time something goes wrong. When a certain traumatic event, or overwhelming period in my life has come to a close I can finally look at it with fresh eyes and see so many of the things I had missed there before. Sort of like watching a psychological thriller more than once to get the full effect, or anything you might have missed the first time around.



Haven't we all been there before? Hasn't everybody gone through something, maybe in a relationship in which only hindsight gave us the true light of what was really going on before our eyes that was for some reason not clear to us at the time? When I think about it in these terms, hindsight can be very..annoying. I wish I could not see now, the things I had never seen then. It stirs up emotions laid to rest, like fallen leaves by the wind.



I think we should have hindsight to thank for our growth, and for our continual acceptance of others. We can so easily call somebody a 'fool' for the decisions they make, the way they speak or act and really, we are not so much more inclined to wisdom than anybody else just because we think we are. I think if we were to realize how often we played the fool ourselves, we would be much slower to slap such a condemning label on to anyone. I remember, not one of my proudest moments growing up, as a seven or eight year old kid having the type of serious discussion only children can. My neighbor and I were playing in our communal stairway, a luxury only kids who live in a building can understand the importance it plays in your socializing time. As usual we were complaining about our parents and somehow we started talking about dads. My friend didn't live with her father and ironically (only in hindsight that is) both her and her sister had different fathers. For some reason-- maybe my two languages were to blame or maybe it was only pure innocent arrogance I can blame it on, I started telling her that if her parent's were not married then he wasn't actually her father. I can see now that I was just a child, confused by the different types of families that existed but back then I had also misconstrued the idea of the nuclear family as being the only kind there was.

Flash forward fifteen or so years: I have two children. Both have different fathers. Coincidence? I highly doubt it. I believe in my higher power. I believe that we learn the lessons we failed to learn the first time through our own sometimes heart aching experiences, the second time around. To sum it all up: never be quick to call someone else the fool, to label them something so permanent in this elastic, ever changing life. Everybody is not done yet. Whether homeless, pregnant and single, divorced, in recovery, on welfare or even just struggling with weight. Not one element of struggle in life is subject to only one "kind" of people. Never be naive enough to believe that one day, your hindsight won't show you something condemning you once thought of someone else in the not so pleasant manner of having you go through it personally. In essence, be kind to yourself in others so hindsight won't feel like such a blind spot.