Hindsight

Recent events have got me thinking about all things hindsight. Coincidentally, at a recent catch up a few friends were discussing about whether we would want to know what the future holds by going to a psychic and thus avoiding having those hindsight moments. I personally have never been to a psychic. I am a big advocate about let things unfolding “naturally”. I remain to think that life is interesting because of the uncertainty ahead. Of course those kinds of sentiments don’t necessarily be shared by everyone. Besides my palm lines are so messy that probably it already predicted a messy life for me.

With me apart from preferring to face the unknown to make life more interesting, it is also partly because for my ostrich approach to life too. For me if I don’t know what’s coming ahead I don’t need to deal with them ahead of time. That doesn’t mean that I don’t plan for things, I do, and I believe everyone should. But I don’t want to be in a position that, if something good was predicted and it didn’t happen, I felt disappointed; and if something bad was predicted, I started to get worried before it even arrives. I know, maybe in that sense I am not a very future friendly person?

Nonetheless, there are times that I did think “If I had known, I would have approached it in a different way”. That applies to a few recent events around me. As I discussed this over the weekend with a few friends, we all felt that sometimes it is good to know the future. This is especially true when we got stuck in a situation that we thought there is no way out. In such situation, we would just be dying to know when the light to the end of the tunnel would come. And mostly often, we would be disappointed because there usually is no such luck when we feel stuck. Sometimes I do understand why some people try to choose the easy way out of life under such situations. But I am not going to talk about that.

As for me personally, I usually try to look at options available. A lot of time there are options, but then we were so clouded with what is happening before us that sometimes we just don’t see it. For example, one of the things I hate most is office politics. I always maintain work itself is straightforward, but then as long as you are working in a group environment, you bound to get yourself dragged into some stupid office politics at some point. I personally believe that while you cannot stop office politics coming to you, you can always choose how to play it or simply not to play it at all. Your options depend on what strategic position in the office you are of course. But I have been in situations that  I decided to play dirty and win (which I did) and at the same time I have been in situations that I simply decided not to play at all because I did not want to give those people the satisfaction of me participating. Those people might think that I threw the towel and lose but indeed for me that was not the situation. I just created an illusion that they won.

Of course if I had known these things were coming towards me ahead of time, I would have adopted different approaches or even get me more prepared. This is when I have that “on the hindsight” moment.  However, hindsight would not be hindsight if we already knew ahead of time. For me, if we actually have that hindsight moment, that means we did learn something out of that situation, which personally I think is a positive outcome we got out of it. We might not need to apply the knowledge we learnt from this hindsight (and sometimes hopefully not need to) but then this knowledge would be available for our disposal in the future if similar situations occurred again. Which, personally I think hindsight is useful in that sense.

I don’t know how many more of those hindsight moments I would have in my life. But then I strongly believe that no matter what was thrown at me that would trigger those hindsight moments, I would emerge stronger and more resilient