When trying to understand people’s actions in the past, always remember this: Everything people did, they always did in the present. That moment was, for them, the only real thing that was. They did not have the vantage point of hindsight which you have now, relative to that moment.
The same thing applies today. This moment now, today, right now, which for you is the realest thing there is, and which confronts you with challenges that sometimes tear you apart, or options that fill you with certainty, this moment too will one day look different when seen in retrospect through the telescopic gaze of the hindsight of others and of yourself. When the world has changed and you too have become someone else.
Just like you’re sometimes not sure today what decision you should take, that’s how those people too were not sure yesterday what decision they should make. And just like you sometimes do something now with the certainty of its rightness, that’s how they too in certainty did something which today, with hindsight, we now realise was wrong. In retrospect. Consciousness is always trapped in the present. Even the consciousness that imagines the future, has itself not left the present.
The past is only the past today. Yesterday, when it was happening, it was not the past. It was the present. And being the present it felt just as real to everybody there and then as the present feels to you right now. Certain and iron-clad. Thus, every decision that everybody makes must always be judged in the light of the time and circumstances in which it was made, in order to really understand it.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Undulating Plains
