Insight and Foresight

When it comes to living, Dear Reader, we human beings are so, so very human, are we not? How often have we done something which we regret?  I am fortunate to be married to Irene who has wonderful insight. Her reading and understanding of people and situations is truly outstanding. She has an uncanny ability to predict what will happen if, and what will occur, when. For instance, it never occurred to me that having a baby in the house would be tiring, even exhausting, but Irene knew. Strange though it may seem, we were not the first people ever in the world to have a child so I should have known. Barrelling through life with casual serendipity, doing what I wanted when I wanted was what I had known. I had a solipsistic view of life.

 Of course, at 70 years of age I am supposed to lose some of my remaining wherewithal. Old age is supposed to chip away at my remaining awareness; remove some of my conversational filters so that what might once have been funny, is now simply weird. I should not have bought milk at the supermarket but they were the last words I heard (“Don’t buy milk we have plenty.”) So ‘milk’ I heard and ‘milk’ I bought. That was indeed a wherewithal loss.  But as a youngster I also lost wherewithal and somehow people were more forgiving. The verdict then smacked of irresponsible youth rather than the more offensive, ageism.

But, friends, I do want to storm the citadels of type casting and stereotyping. I want to confront those who think that these blogs, for example, are the rabid ravings of an old man. I want say to them that some things about which I now write engendered the same feelings when I was in my twenties. I always roved and reasoned between the acceptable and the unacceptable. It took many a hand on the shoulder to tell me that my bombastic blurtings were offside and ridiculous. But I had had enough of a boarding school education to know that there was a time to speak and a time to listen; it was a place where youth was brutally and physically honest; where nobody suffered fools gladly and all of us, as teenage boys, should have been, let’s face it, by definition, fools. There must have been, at that time, a damascene moment when I learned to hold my counsel because peer ridicule has a great impact on wherewithal.

I think, Dear Reader, that insight and foresight are two qualities that are joined at the hip. They are both spawned in the same river. They do seem to arrive by a circuitous route which involves sociability and experience. One does not reach up to the apple tree of insight and pluck the perfect fruit of foresight. On the way one picks the unripe and inedible, the over-ripe and rotten.  Insight means watching and learning; foresight means watching and learning and predicting. I guess we all have had cringe inducing moments in our lives which we would like to redo. You know, Friends, that moment when you have told people how it is and moments later realise that that is how it isn’t. I do remember telling young Gary not to let go as he was swinging across a stream on a knotted rope. Sadly he only heard, “Let go.” As a learning disabled child I should have sat him down prior to the adventure and explained it to him in minute detail. He ended up muddy and wet and shivering but he, Dear Reader, felt better than I did.

I will always encourage people to read but I am the first to admit that much useful knowledge is to be found by ‘doing not by watching and queuing’ as an old college lecturer of mine used to say. But, Dear Friends, in order to see the possible, nay probable, one needs the experience of both insight and foresight. One has to pick the pockets of those who are more experienced than we are, have seen more than we have and are thus able to demonstrate what does and does not work. And I guess that we also have to decide whether we respect their wherewithal or not. A clash of wherewithals is never good, don’t you know?

When I was a child in my pre-teens at an all-boys prep school, we had a teacher called Mr. Humby. It would be wrong to say that he ruled us with a rod of iron but it would be right to say that his presence was enough to commandeer the greatest respect. So there were always gaps between lessons as we would wait for the next master to arrive. In my school the mountain always waited for Mohammed. In the meantime we would do things that boys do like squeeze John Fellowes spots or wipe our boogers on Nobby Clarke’s shirt. We always had a guard on the door. When Mr. Humby was walking towards us the sentinel would always shout ‘Kay-vee’ (‘Cave’, Latin for ‘beware’) at which point we would dash to our desks and sit up in innocent, sweet obeisance ready for our teacher’s arrival. We always thought, Dear Reader, how naïve and gullible Mr. Humby was because he would always proceed down the hall spouting Shakespeare loudly. We would hear ‘Out, out damn spot’ or ‘to be or not to be’ way before our mate’s ‘Cave’. We always believed, sniggering behind a hand, that the naive old codger had lost the plot because if he had but approached quietly the ‘Cave’ would not have mattered. We would have been caught in our nefarious, chalk throwing, ink pellet, snotter flicking acts. But, John Humby was wise, John Humby was clever, John Humby knew what was important, John Humby did not sweat the small stuff. Dear Friends, ‘wisdom is knowing what to overlook’. The last thing John Humby wanted to do was catch us in a William Golding montage of “Lord of the Flies”, waste all of his time sorting out poor behaviour. So he and the Bard announced their presence some way before they reached the classroom door.

On his death I discovered that John Humby had been involved in Operation Market Garden which became the movie ‘A Bridge too Far’. He had been parachuted into Holland in World War II behind enemy lines to take the bridges of Arnhem and Nijmegen and hold them ahead of an allied advance. It was a bit of a glorious failure but an heroic one nevertheless. What need, Dear Reader, did John Humby have to sort out puerile issues of no consequence when he had seen what he had seen? He had experienced bravery, cowardice, terrible wasteful death, fear, botched plans, foolhardy life risking ideas and he had come through them all to teach young men how to grow up, and also, dare I say it, grow up with minimal guidance; to fail or succeed in our own way. John Humby was a wise man.

“Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.”

This is a now famous, probably clichéd, saying. To me it expresses something which can be taught but best comes from personal experience, rather, I suggest to you, Dear Reader, like insight and foresight.