The Curse of Hindsight

Do you ever find yourself wondering what if you had done some things differently? As in your mind saying to you that how could you be so oblivious to something at the time even when the consequences of your actions or decisions were staring right at you? What was the point of it all, you question. It was so evident what it would lead to and yet you went ahead. Or at least so it seems now. I call it the curse of hindsight. A quick story first up:

Once upon a time in a certain village, there was a young boy named Dhani. He had the natural traits and body of a wrestler. Muscular, agile, fast thinker, with solid bone density and broad shoulders. Everyone was so sure that he was going to represent his country on the world stage one day. Even his master and coach, who ran the akhara said the boy had hands that remembered a hold before the brain had thought of it. All in all, the boy had trees for arms.

To his credit, Dhani too gave up everything a young man gives up for a thing like this. He stopped going to the fairs, stopped hanging out with the boys who simply loitered about. He woke before the rooster, drank his milk and almonds, dug the pit with the others, oiled himself, and threw his body into the red earth until the sun was high. Over the next eight years, he went onto win every district and state tournament, even two national tournaments.

The call from the Olympics selection committee came and it was a given that Dhani had an unassailable lead over everyone else. But even during a match against a clumsy rookie, Dhani's knee turned the wrong way on the ring, and that was the end of the knee, his career, and his life as he knew it.

He developed a limp and was not fit for even coaching anyone, let alone be a world-class wrestler. Seething from his loss, a few years later, he finally gave in to the new truth of his life and took up his father's small provision store, living hand to mouth.

In his early thirties, a heavy man now, the shoulders gone soft, his silence had turned into something sour. You could tell that something was eating him from the inside like a termite eats a beam while the wall still looks like a wall.

His coach stopped by his shop one day to buy some groceries, and Dhani offered him a cup of tea. They hadn't met in years. They talked for a while about nothing, and then the resentment and a sense of loss spilled out of Dhani.

"I never thought life would be so unfair to me," he said.

"You see these other fellows," he said further, tilting his head toward the men in the bazaar, the shopkeepers, the clerks, the man selling sweets across the lane. "They never tried anything. They ate, they slept, they got fat young, they married, they are happy. I was supposed to be different. I gave my whole youth to that pit. And look. I am fatter than they are and poorer than they are, and I do not even have what they have, which is that they never lost anything because they never reached for anything."

"I am neither, a nobody now. I am not a wrestler, and I am not a man who lived an ordinary contented life. I let go of the second to chase the first, and I caught neither. Tell me, Ustad ji, all those mornings, eight years of mornings. What was the point of even starting?"

"That knee turning in the ring was a real grief," the master said. "I will not stand here and tell you it was not. I grieved it too. I had a champion, and then I had a boy with a ruined knee. So, I am not going to insult you with comfort. But you are asking the wrong question.

"You think the point was the selection or the medal you didn't win, the kingdom of wrestling you didn't inherit. So now you do the math that I gave eight years, I received nothing, the books are wiped clean, I was a fool. But you've made a mistake in your accounting, Dhani. You wrote down only the medal as income and everything else as loss.

"You ask what the point of eight years of mornings was. Here: The wrestling you gave your life to was never building a champion. It was building a man who could lose the thing he loved most and still have something left under him to stand on."

"Besides," the coach continued, "let me ask you candidly, if I could go back to that first morning, the cold, the milk, the dark, the eight years you cannot get back, and I told you: Dhani, I have seen the future. The knee will turn. The clumsy boy will win. You will sell groceries in a tiny shop and grow fat and bitter and one day a fool of an old man will sit at your shop and ask you why you bothered, knowing all of that, every bit of it, would the boy you were have stayed in bed?"

I ask you the same thing. No matter what you think now, given your temperament, your inherent nature, your tendencies, would you have done anything differently? Let me tell you that even if you imagine you might have, you probably wouldn't. If not this, you'd have done or taken up something just as difficult and formidable. Because that's who we are, curious seekers who will keep poking life just to see what it does. And that's the fun of it all. There's no other way, this is the way, it always was.

Don't let hindsight cloud your foresight.

Peace.
Swami