Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
– Kierkegaard
They say hindsight is 20/20, and that may be true…but regardless of how well we may or may not understand the things in life that have brought us to where we are, only by moving forward can we make any progress. This may seem like an obviously simple platitude, but so many of us focus an absolutely absurd amount of attention on what we’ve done in the past and so very little on what we are currently doing in the present moment. In fact, too often we allow the reflection of what we’ve done, which has seemingly resulted in who we are, to be the primary determinate to who we will become. This is crippling. We are bounding our futures by the definitions of our past. Maybe if we spent a little less time thinking about what we’ve become and a little more time becoming, we’d be able to see that the future is not constrained by the past. In fact, it is free from it in its entirety.
Living in our past, whether it be our failures or successes, stifles our ownership of the present. Too often we think of living in the past when we ruminate on the negative. But this applies to the ownership of both good things and bad. If we tell ourselves that the only reason we are where we are in life, that we are only successful, creative, or exceptional because of the path we’ve chosen, we’re not able to fully accept responsibility for the things we’ve done. In the same way that blaming your mistakes or circumstances on the past suppresses your ability to take ownership over your choices and actions, so does attributing the things you’ve done well to the virtue of circumstance. Own every single thing that you’ve ever done. Understand that it’s all a piece to the composite that is you. But most critically, understand that your potential is not constrained by these things that you now have ownership over. Embrace what you see looking backwards, shape what you see ahead of you and live forward.
We are free in every moment to accept full responsibility for each action we take and each choice that we make. Though the totality of understanding the true depth of life can only be accomplished through the reflection of the amalgamation of the past, living forward requires that we leave that amalgam sitting just behind the present. Untethered, it’s the ice floe created by the fissure of the present. A link to where we’ve been, but in no way contingent to where we’re going. We must lean into life, because not doing so is to risk losing ourselves in the seas of our past, stranded on a floe just out of reach from the shelf.
