Hindsight—No, Foresight—is 2020

I do not read The Van Nuys News, and I wasn’t even a twinkle in my parents’ eyes in 1949, so I certainly wasn’t reading it then. That’s where the first use of the phrase “Most people’s hindsight is 20/20” appeared. It originates in the Snellen chart, you know the one, that standardized eye chart that was first published in 1862. I cannot be the only one who has invoked the axiom this year.

David Brooks laments in his Op-Ed piece in this morning’s New York Times, “This is the year that broke the truth. … Worse, this was the year that called into question the very processes by which our society supposedly makes progress.

“So many of our hopes are based on the idea that the key to change is education. We can teach each other to be more informed and make better decisions. We can study social injustices and change our behavior to fight them.” Diversity training, anyone?

“But this was the year that showed that our models for how we change minds or change behavior are deeply flawed. … It turns out that if you tell someone their facts are wrong, you don’t usually win them over; you just entrench false belief.”

No thinking person could argue his point. The evidence sits in mountains all around us.

We live in the much-touted information age. I have had dinner with people who spent most of our evening together Googling things on their phones to prove their point rather than looking in my eyes and having a conversation. It brings me to a stutter still. You probably have, too.

Informing people, delivering new information, is a wonderful way to introduce a new idea about anything to anyone, but information, as Mr. Brooks discovered, doesn’t serve the function we humans have assigned it no matter how much we may want it to do so. We’ve been looking upward; it’s the wrong direction.

Mr. Brooks concludes, “People change when they are put in new environments, in permanent relationship with diverse groups of people. Their embodied minds adapt to the environments in a million different ways we will never understand or be able to plan. … Real change seems to involve putting bodies from different groups in the same room, on the same team and in the same neighborhood. … It’s how new emotional bonds are formed, how new conceptions of who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’ come into being.”

I beg, politely, to differ with Mr. Brooks. Perhaps there are some ways in which we adapt that humans haven’t named, but we who study human nature certainly do know a lot about the ways to create change, or, better said, to create environments which foster change. One of the major ones, as Mr. Brooks has discovered, is to put ourselves into new and different situations from our norms.

Another is only hinted at by Mr. Brooks, but it’s the best, easiest, fastest way to change. He cites it as “new emotional bonds,” and leaves out what’s implied. As all metaphysicians know, change, genuine, real, permanent change, is a change of heart. Once the heart changes, then, and only then, can the mind follow, and once the mind follows, the body is totally on board.

In a delightfully whimsical article by Elisa Gabbert called, “How Poets Use Punctuation as a Superpower and a Secret Weapon,” she writes of a poem by Benjamin Garcia called “Heroin With an E,” drawing attention to the // he uses at the ends of his lines, and cites,

“when all of what had to have happened // happened.

This pause feels loud, loud and more sudden than the pause of an ellipsis, not a trailing off or a vague omission but a slam, decisive, like a palm on a table.”

That is what the information we-who-looked-up-from-our-devices received in 2020 feels like to me. The sharp slap of a large palm on a hardwood table. A slap that, forgive me—in hindsight, demands that we pay attention. To what you might ask? Oh, to our epidemic of loneliness, to our grieving-ness, to our too-busy-ness, to our broken infrastructure-ness, to our racial, economic, ethnic, political, religious, environmental divisiveness—and these just for a start, on the macro level.

But collective change without shared vision is worse than a pipe dream. It’s the impossible writ large. People came together during the Second World War because right from the top—take it temporally or governmentally—we were all enlisted men and women, enlisted together in the war effort. To borrow a phrase, “No one left behind.”

Nicole Tersigni, author of “Men to Avoid in Art and Life,” a new offering from Chronicle Books, explains mansplaining with help from 17th century art. It all started on Twitter. She writes, “The mansplainer explains things in a condescending way. Their thoughts are always unsolicited. Nobody is asking for them. One of my favorite jokes that I used in the thread and also in the book for the mansplainer is, ‘Let me explain your lived experience.’”

Mansplainers, supposedly, deal in information, but not really. Instead, they deal in opinion. So do racesplainers, agesplainers, religionsplainers, gendersplainers, sexsplainers, economicsplainers, and every other kind of ’splainer you can dream up. What they uniformly do not ever do is bring their hearts to bear on their preferred subjects because they do not have those lived experiences.

Margaret Renkl is a lifelong resident of Nashville. In her essay this morning, she writes, “[T]he bomb that went off on Christmas morning feels like a visible manifestation of a quiet alienation that has been growing here for more than two decades. An alienation that reached its nadir this year during a pandemic that saw locals dutifully staying home but downtown bar owners fighting quarantine restrictions.”

Nadir is a good word for where we are today. The OED tells me it means the most unsuccessful point in a situation. It comes from the science of astronomy. No mistake that the word that has come up for 2020 more often than any other is disaster which means without stars.

Ms. Renkl concludes, “Pressed into service unrelentingly, resilience can develop into a carapace that grows too hard, a scab that closes off a festering desperation. And if any good is to emerge from all this grief, it will only be because we have learned not to ignore the suffering that came first. If we finally address the grief that came before the grief.”

The suffering that came first, Beloved, lives in the hearts, not just the minds of people you know and people I know, people we all know. Ms. Gabbert observes, “An ampersand alone on a page would represent a pronounceable word.” Actually, it does. That word is And. Go back to the suffering a moment please. Instead of looking up, look within, and let’s ask ourselves, And what are we prepared to do about it?

Linda Greenhouse covers The Supreme Court for The New York Times. In her essay this morning, she tells what she calls “my Joe Biden story” because, as she maintains, Uncle Joe has been around so long that most journalists have one. The details are less important than her conclusion, “What I hadn’t encountered was a politician like Mr. Biden, willing to let his guard down and reflect on his vulnerabilities.” Joe Biden’s vulnerability was hard-won, Beloved. All vulnerability is.

Vulnerability doesn’t operate in the realm of information, Beloved. Neither does real or sustainable change. We’re plenty well-informed if we want to be, and if we don’t, then we aren’t.

Vulnerability requires that we take the advice of the Little Prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's book of the same name, “Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

At the end of a year when what is essential has been sought out, discussed, parsed out, disagreed upon, compromised over, and rewarded, at the end of a year when what was essential is what allowed the rest of us to, at no matter how diminished a state, go on, how can we possibly do less than look within to bring the eyes of our hearts to one another in 2021?

May I challenge you in this new year as I plan to challenge myself? Seek out new groups, new experiences, new ideas, new growth opportunities. Bring the eyes of your heart to each one, and know, Beloved, that as you do, you are gladsomely contributing to the change that the foresight provided by 2020 has given us all—if we’ll take it.

Happy New Year.

Dr. Susan Corso is a spiritual teacher, the founder of iAmpersand, and the author of The Mex Mysteries, the Boots & Boas Books, and spiritual nonfiction. Her essays address the intersection between spirituality and culture. Find out more at www.susancorso.com