Rearviews and Rainstorms 5/29/2022

By: Jennifer Richardson Holt

They say that hindsight is 20/20.  Most of us know that it’s true but I was thinking about it as of late.  If you’ve read my recent blogs, then you know that my daughter is quickly growing up before my very eyes in what seems to be a matter of minutes. Everyone tells me to enjoy these moments.  Even the tear-jerking song that played in the school auditorium as pictures of her in her kindergarten class scrolled across the screen while we waited for her graduation told me that I was going to miss this.  I can feel it deep down in my bones that those lyrics that caused my eyes to blur and a knot to form in my throat were truth.  I know how fast things are moving and one cant help but feel somewhat helpless as the hands of the clock seem to whir faster with every second. But I was taken by one deep and astonishing fact.  There are some things we really and truly cannot see the value of until they are in fact the past. How many stories have we heard our elders tell of the “good old days”?  But even they in all their experience and wisdom probably didn’t realize just how good those old days were until they were just that; old. It almost seems unfair that there are some lessons we cannot learn until we have to look back from a struggle and some moments that we cannot truly see for the treasures that they are until they are mere memories.

I think of when we are children. Not very young children but youth on the precipice of becoming teenagers with some measure of independence yet still, for the most part, fully reliant on our parents.  There may be a hundredth of a percent of us that ever genuinely realized just how good we had it. We agonized over our dreaded rules and chores that we had to do and were certain that our parents were oppressors who had no other goal in life than to be sure that we had as little fun as humanly possible.  We had no idea how wonderful our lives were.  We had no annoying and ever-present bills.  We didn’t have mortgages.  We didn’t know the joys of debt and taxes and obnoxious bosses,  All we had to consider was what next fun occasion we could conjure with our friends or what the latest music or trendy clothing was. Oh, the lives we had!  And the thing is, I think it would be virtually impossible to convince any youthful soul in such a place of just how glorious their lives are.  It is something that simply cannot be seen in that place. It is only when we bloom into adulthood can we actually look in the rearview and grasp that we really had it all.

As a parent this concept is ever present as well. We go through each stage of our children’s lives and while we do revel in the joys and laughter and often do hold dear those memorable moments, how often do we overlook the everyday pleasures?  How many times do we not really allow an unwarranted hug to linger like it could?  I am sure there are times that when a little one comes to you for help that we don’t honestly understand the magnitude of this.  These are the times long before their little spirits are overwhelmed by the insistence to “do it themselves” and we can be truly needed that mean so much. But it is almost always after they have become self-sufficient and begin to shun our presence that we realize how valuable those times when we were wanted and needed really were and are.  It will not be long before those times are memories, and we can only look back and reminisce.  Not only will it not be long, but it will be faster than we can possibly imagine. I still have a small child and have years to go before this is lost but it moves so quickly, I can almost feel it slipping through my fingers like sands in an hourglass.  It is a cold fact that once those jewels are out of are grasp is when we truly realize what we had. I guess another old saying comes into play here in that “we don’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone.”  It seems cruel to me that riches of parenting, that at the time just seem like the monotony of everyday life, will one day in the future be the things that make us stare into the distance, possibly with tears in our eyes.  We simply didn’t or couldn’t see at the time. And once we can see it’s only in our mind’s eye. It is a beautiful view, but it is a glory and a sorrow all at once.

There is a blind spot in the present.  We don’t have it intentionally. I feel most of us really do try to value as much as we can of the lives we live. But there is that fog that seems to cover our view that will only lift when we look back upon it all. Then, and it seems only then, will our sight be cleared as if a summer rain has cleared the haze from the air.  Then, also like the landscape after a rain, even the most mundane of objects will glitter and sparkle and be so much more than what they had been. I suppose this is the way that it always has been.  We see so much more looking back and I am not sure any amount of awareness of the joys of today can keep that from being the case. But all we can do is try to savor the present and be as aware as we can that each moment is the only of its kind. I heard a commercial slogan just today. It was for ice cream that is supposed to be reminiscent of the old-fashioned homemade type (and I admit, it lives up to its hype).  But its slogan is something to the affect of “The good old days are happening now.”  I thought it was a fantastic phrase. We may not be able to see that until later, but if we can take that to heart, perhaps we can get a bit of sparkle even before the rain.