Bored the other night, I decided to go through my journals and stencil out the past decade of my life in a timeline. I organized the timeline around places I've lived (i.e. addresses):
1999 to August 2005: Wellington Way in Springboro, OH
August 2005 to May 2009: Cincinnati Christian University in Cincinnati, OH
+ Summer 2006: Wellington Way
+ Summer 2007: Joseph Badger Meadows
+ Summer 2008: Forest Lake, Minnesota
May 2009 to February 2010: The Lehman House in Cincinnati, OH
February 2010 to June 2011: Bunnell Hill in Centerville, OH
June 2011 to Present: The Claypole House in Cincinnati, OH
The purpose of this? Other than tickling my nostalgic nerve spots, I've enjoyed looking through many of my experiences in those times and seeing both (a) how my worldview is evolving and (b) how that evolution is not independent of the events but integrally connected to both those events and (principally) my interpretation of them. It's both fascinating and humbling to see the evolution of the way I perceive reality and everything in it (not excluding God and myself): it's fascinating, to see the person I was and the person I've become; and it's humbling, because I was confident about my worldview's validity then just as I am certain of it now--but much has changed, and though my former confidence was invalidated by the tweaking and reshaping of the worldview, that confidence remains persistent. Rather than confidence there should be humility: the humility that hindsight offers, namely that as certain as we think we are in the present, five years down the road we'll be laughing at how stupid we really were. And here's the thing about hindsight: it doesn't really work. It doesn't show us, as we'd like to think, how things "really were," thus giving us a God's-eye picture of the past event and (one might think) the God-like omniscience to know how we should have done things differently. Hindsight only tells us about the past (or our memory of the past) in relation to our current worldview; hindsight tells us more about our current perception of the world than it does the authenticity of our former ones. The fact that future hindsight will kick our present confidence in the ass should make us wary of being too certain, and it should make us cautious in falling victim to the illusions of hindsight.
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