It was Søren Kierkegaard who said that (and I paraphrase) life can only be understood backwards however we must live it forwards. Although I have been aware of that quote for quite some time it is only recently that I have begun to understand the real nature and truth of it.
The difficulty of understanding what is happening to us at any given time of our life is certainly something that we have all experienced. In recent months I have been looking back over my life and – if not exactly making sense of it – at least seeing where many things have been put in place one way or another.
My previous post on Living in Parallel Worlds was, I guess, along these lines – however, the important thing from the point of view of this entry is that we can often only discern these threads, worlds, stories in retrospect – and in particular we can never be sure which of the worlds is being affected by any single happening in our life – be it a single thread or multiple threads.
Another previous post – Prediction is Difficult – also dealt with aspects of this – mainly how “in the moment” it is often difficult to know how a particular decision will look when viewed retrospectively.
What – to me – is particularly important is the difficulty of separating the challenging decisions from the mundane. Especially as often the time span that we consider when ‘forecasting’ the outcome is relatively short. Looking back – it is clear that I cannot remember everything I have done, said or thought. I suspect that what I do remember is a very small percentage of the total.
Does that make all the things that I have ‘forgotten’ unimportant? Well no!! I am equally sure that many things that I do no not remember had implications for people that may still be reverbrating through history! Certainly I can think of things that I have remembered (having seemingly forgotten them in the meantime) which have had significant effects – so what proportion of my ‘forgotten life’ is actually important – just out of my mind.
We exist by weaving a story about how we have got to where we are – that story is, of course, predicated on what we remember – what we ar consciously building into the narrative of our life. Some threads will have gone off like an axed tv series never to reach a proper conclusion; some are going on and on like an interminable soap opera; some only get resurrected like Christmas Specials; and some seemingly hibernate before someone suddenly realises that it was good/important after all and brings it back into focus – often rather suddenly.
I need to consider this topic a bit more and I am sure that there are some more entries in this blog to come as this one has been more of an introduction of an idea rather than a working through of an idea.