I was listening to the radio on my way to work this morning and heard the song “Wish I Didn’t Know Now” by Toby Keith.
If you haven’t heard it, some of the lyrics are “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then. I wish I could start this whole thing over again.”
I started thinking about how many times I get stuck in this kind of mindset…the mindset involving hindsight. Hindsight is when you understand a situation or event better only after is happens. I’m sure you’ve also heard the saying, “Hindsight is 20/20.” by Billy Wilder.
I started thinking about how many times I’ve beat myself up mentally using hindsight. I do try to remind myself that it doesn’t do any good to say, “if only,” or “I should’ve known better,” or “I just didn’t think,” after a situation has gone wrong. It doesn’t change anything after the fact. Whatever has happened has already happened.
Of course it would be nice if when something didn’t go my way, I could simply call “do over”, but that rarely happens in life. I guess if I am playing tennis and get a “let serve”, or playing football and a flag is thrown, then maybe I get another chance, but not usually in my every day.
Computers are unlocked through “Control, Alt, Delete”, prior to inputting a password. Wouldn’t it be great if that’s how you could unlock the secrets to life ahead of time…especially the secrets to success or the secrets to “what’s in a teenager’s head”!
But we can’t. So, the next best thing to getting it right the first time every time (which we also know can’t happen) is to learn from the situations we face. I guess that’s how I can take advantage of my hindsight by actually learning from my mistakes and trying to prevent them from reoccurring.
I like the saying, “there’s no crying over spilt milk”. There really is no point. The milk is already spilt. The best thing to do is to clean it up and figure out if there was anything that could’ve helped prevent the spill. In other words, I’m combining hindsight with insight (trying to gain an accurate understanding of something) and foresight (trying to look at how things might happen in the future) .
Byrd Baggett suggests that “life should be viewed thru the windshield, not thru the rear view mirror.” I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my time-I make many every day, even though I obviously don’t set out to and I have great intentions. I’m willing to say, “my bad” and try again, looking forward, looking ahead and not dwelling. I will continue to look at what lies ahead of me and not at what has happened, other than to learn and grow from it.
So instead of getting on myself for the missed workouts or the things I was hoping to accomplish over vacation, I’m going to “keep my eyes on the prize” so to speak. I’m going to set my goals and go after then, and if I falter along the way, then so be it. I will simply start over and make the necessary adjustments to try to prevent failure, getting sidetracked or preventable mistakes from occurring the next time.
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