Captain Hindsight

The other day, I was telling my son about a decision that I had made and that knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have made the decision they way I did. Which got us to talking about hindsight being 20/20 and that rabbit-trailed our discussion to my son asking, “have you seen the episode of South Park where the townsfolk meet the superhero Captain Hindsight?” Which of course I had not, so he goes on to tell me that in the episode, Captain Hindsight arrives at the scene of a burning fire in an apartment building, with firefighters trying to put it out, but instead of trying to resolve the crisis at hand, he explains to the crowd the precautions that should’ve been taken to prevent the disaster.

From Google:
Jack "Captain Hindsight" Brollin based on the eponymous superhero character originally featured in an episode of the animated TV series South Park is a superhero who "helps" people in need by appearing at the scene to lecture them about what they did wrong to get into a certain accident and what methods they could have used to avoid it, instead of actually rescuing them. Inspired by the character, image captions generally present various types of predicaments and then lecture on what could’ve been done differently to avoid the situation altogether. Despite this, civilians still feel much better afterwards. Perfect 20/20 hindsight is the power that Captain Hindsight is most associated with. With his natural hindsight abilities raised to superhuman levels, due to an accident with a retroactive spider, Captain Hindsight can immediately know how an event could have been avoided just by looking at the scene.

We all know the famous saying that hindsight is 20/20 and that if you knew then what you know now, you'd likely not make that decision the way you did.  However, we all tend to make our choices based on the facts that we have at hand and making our decisions as best we can with the information in front of us.

The point of this post?  Well, knowing now what I know, I likely wouldn’t have made the decision that way I did {hence the title}.  But had I not decided to do what I did, I would not have realized that I was unable to do what I thought I was able to do.  The only way to understand where we’ve come from is to have actually have been there, and I could not have come up with the same conclusions had I not done what I had originally decided to do.

Ironically we are like Captain Hindsight, we all have the superpower of perfect 20/20 hindsight vision, and yet the greatest weakness to this power as Hindsight demonstrated, is the fact the ability only works after the action has occurred, which more often than not can make us regret doing the action in the first place and could make us second guess every action we do.

And yet, as I re-read about that decision that I made in this post I am again reminded of the words from scripture: And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28 {New International Version (NIV)}

Blessings