How I came to find Jesus is.. well, he kind of found me.
Sweet Jesus I’m talking about. Sweet Jesus and Badger, a couple of grizzled (by the time I met them) young bucks from Marquette, Michigan out hiking the Pacific Crest Trail somewhere between college graduation and real world immersion. Quick hikers, young and strong and stronger for being lifelong friends out there together as a team, they started the trail a week after me. I mention the latter only to put forth the probable cause for our belated meeting at Kennedy Meadows. Had they begun at the Kickoff with the herd, they would have passed me long ago.
I met these two fine young men during my rather awkward five days at Kennedy Meadows, toward the end of my stay at Tom’s place. The change of packs, the addition of ice axe, crampons, bear vault, down jacket, these physical changes mirrored and compounded the psychological yolk I was bearing, the spiritual elephant on my back as it were. I was a mess from the moment my friends Mike and Cassie left for San Diego. To borrow an overused cliche, you could have knocked me over with a feather. As I’ll get to later, one fellow thruhiker did.
Kennedy had to have been a tough time for Sweet Jesus & Badger as well. They walked into Kennedy a team of three and walked out one man short. Their friend, Griz, another guy from back home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, got off trail purportedly due to an inflamed car payment, not a common trail injury on the surface, least I’d never heard of it, but one easily understood with a little contemplation. People leave the trail for every imaginable reason. Finances no doubt rate right up there with loneliness in the top five.
Hindsight has to be about the worst of human cognitive abilities. It lets us “see” what could have been had we made a different choice at one moment in time. But that alleged other destiny unchosen, that road not taken, is a lie. Because in our minds, we go back in time and change that one choice and then gleefully run forward in time to the present assuming every consequent change would have been for the better and oh damn aren’t we fools for not having made that one choice differently 873,401 choices ago that day two months back.
Okay, so I just pulled that number out of thin air. But do you see the problem? We make a lot of choices every minute of every day. If we failed to make a better choice about something even a few days ago, it doesn’t guarantee that, given the ability to travel time and go back and alter that choice, that we wouldn’t then err again sometime between now and then. Or then and now, as it were.
So any product of hindsight is a fiction. And since only on very rare occasions do a select few vengeful humans look back and say, “I wish I hadn’t done that good thing I did!” then hindsight, when indulged in, can rarely be a positive experience. I imagine it is very often rather cruel and masochistic. So don’t do it!
Stop right now, Reader! Stop it! Because I know simply by the power of suggestion I have inadvertently triggered some memory of some past event you wish had gone differently. Well, it couldn’t have gone differently! Alright, given your time machine, maybe you could go back and change it for a second or a minute or a day. But there’s no guarantee it would hold for long. Because between that moment and today, right now, uncountable choices have been made by you and everyone in the web of life that surrounds and effects you. Too many variables.
Even something as acute as pulling a trigger or not pulling a trigger. There is no guarantee that going back and changing that one moment would save that life, or your own. Am I saying that Fate is fixed? Do I believe the game is rigged?
No. I am not saying that. I am only saying that choice occurs so often and by so many interdependent souls all at the same time that to engage in hindsight is to step outside the present and dwell in a fantasy of inconceivable improbability when all one need do to change the course of history is begin now.
This very moment. Right here. Right now.
I next saw Sweet Jesus and Badger on that frost-laden morning one day’s hike north of Kennedy, the morning that the party of three ladies who’d bade me come hike with them disintegrated, two of them at first light, Arctic specters trudging off in the cold snowy half-light of eternal winter doomed by their haste.
Or so I imagined, snug in my down bag, hiding from the frost. Carmen, the third ready just a heartbeat ahead of me an hour later, gave me a look I can only describe as one given an embattled lover as a last chance offer before departing forever, and left without me. To her credit, lest I make her seem cold (she wasn’t – just businesslike) she didn’t just look at me but beckoned me, “Abby?” one word communicating many thoughts: here’s your chance, choose now, us or them, the ladies or the men. For there I stood with Badger and Jesus, and two section hikers Norway and Jack Straw, all men.
One must follow one’s heart, one’s intuition, though it be not always spot on, the result not always the best. So many influences play upon the heart. But again, hindsight is no sight at all. So we do and we choose and we hope for the best. I chose the men.
“Why the hell did I choose the men?” I might ask myself while sitting on my be-hind sighting my way back in time several weeks now. But I don’t ask myself that and for good reason.
The girls, kind as they were to invite me to join them, came off very businesslike. They weren’t real warm and fuzzy. But what am I saying? Nobody on the trail was REAL warm and fuzzy. We, and I include myself in here for despite my best efforts I’m sure I came off as an aloof prick a lot of the time thanks to a growing sense of alienation, we then were all as tough as the trail had demanded we become. With a few exceptions. Sweet Jesus and Badger, in hindsight anyway (oh, how I love the frailty of a proposition), had the shoe size to fit the glass slipper of this cobbler of exceptional character.
“What?” you ask.
“They were an exception to the rule. They were not all business. They were warm and fuzzy.”
“Oh,” you say. “Why didn’t you just say that?”
“Because I’m having a particularly odd day of florid description, sort of foaming at the mouth with big and useless stupid words. I’m sorry it won’t happen again.”
“Sure.”
Okay. Where were we?
I let Carmen go. Norway had hiked the next 200 miles of trail three times. I wagered, and not incorrectly, that he was a safe bet for the safest guy with whom to hike. And I liked these characters Sweet Jesus & Badger. Though so far I knew little of them, I liked their energy. If they were at all businesslike, I had yet to see it. I thought perhaps we’d all hike together, we gang of five.
That idea proved entirely hallucinatory. One minute they were screwing around not looking ready to go and the next they were packed and saying “Later.”
It constantly amazed me on the Pacific Crest Trail how often this happened, the most exaggerated occurrence now behind me at Kennedy Meadows. My entire stay there was one protracted episode of being left behind, one hiker at a time. Kennedy was like what happened whenever I made camp with anyone on the trail, but in slow motion over a couple of days time. One minute someone looked at ease, smoking a bowl, no big rush, collecting their stuff, maybe making off into the woods with a roll of toilet paper for a spell, and the next bam! They’re locked and loaded and gone. And as I’ve said before, you can bend over to tie your shoes on a long trail and never again see someone with whom you were just engaged in conversation.
So I didn’t learn much about Sweet Jesus & Badger that day either. Next time I would see them was three days hence.
I kept up with Norway fine that day resulting in that unforgettable night of dreamy fireside dialogue beneath the vault of the heavens, a dreamy night’s talk of McCandless and freedom and all things which define us as free-thinking and free-roaming persons, a night made all the more surreal by the spell of Norway’s whiskey and, for him (for I did not partake) his herb.
In my memory I see that scene now not as I have it photographed from our perspective by the fire but from far off, the view of some mountain lion at 9700 feet looking down on our 9200. The cat sees a clear night sky, every star in the heavens diamond bright way out here far from the polluting light of cities. He sees the trees and the wide areas of open mountain in between each tree, all the stone, all things in shades of gray. All except us. Norway and me and our little fire burning up the side of one tall rock. Our hearth.
We are the one little bit of yellow light in the night, surrounded by gray to the horizon and then the endless sea of blue black sky. The sea’s depths are littered with tiny white pearlescent mementos, memories of lives organic and inorganic lived out and long extinct in an inconceivably distant past somewhere so deep in that well of space as to be mined only by the tools of imagination.
What a far out thing for a cat to see, for me to see, as I fall back from the fire and stare skyward, sensing him near, imagining him and all of this.
- Rick McKinney
[More on the tale of Sweet Jesus & Badger next time...]
Hindsight is not an entirely useless and negative ability. True, used in a regretful manner as you describe — wishing you’d made a different choice and wondering “what might have been” — it’s a sad and fruitless endeavor. But when you can look back and see that you made a RIGHT choice, hindsight can give you comfort and confidence in your future choices. Think positive!
everything is perfect in conception and perfect in execution, all time runs concurrently, so “hindsight” is pure illusion/delusion.
reality – we make it up as we go.
a “right” choice, or “correct” choice, as looked at from the present, only reflects the subjective memory of the experiencer.
since we are all “One” thing, we just dive into separation quick as a wink, “you” think “you” are “you”, “i” think “i” am “me”, etc…
as for jesus, a meme, if he had existed and had his head cut off, every sheep would be wearing a sacrificial guillotine around their neck. guilt and recrimination have no space in my glowing entourage, so every choice i have made is supportable in hindsight…
Multiple Choice Question: What do I want most from life?
A. No regrets.
B. Regrets.
The difference between Choice A and Choice B is the difference between growing old gracefully, or vainly trying to hold onto youth; between wishing things were different, or finding joy in the way things are; between hindsight as weighty baggage to carry, or hindsight as valuable experience to treasure and share.
As for me, I make a conscious decision to chose ‘no regrets.’ Everytime.
any voyage to the past is fraught with the possibilities of selective remembrance, and subjective fits of spontaneous imaginations.
these are things which most people have occurring in their thoughts.
a conscious decision to choose “no regrets” is tacit permission for the “feel good”, not responsible for all the animals and humans killed in your name, section of your mind to create a rosy picture, just as rosy as a person could want.
unless, of course, the person has, at the behest of, and with permission of their parents, been ruined and mind controlled into a religion, so have plenty of guilt about making up stories, even if they were only telling them to themselves.
(smile)
some people are so fat they can’t even catch sight of their hind!