You Are Not Supposed to Know Yet: Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards

On the scene that makes no sense until the end

I hurt my right hand a while back.

Nothing dramatic. Just enough that writing was off the table, which for me is not a small thing. Writing is how I find out what I think. Take it away and I am walking around full of half-formed things with nowhere to put them.

I was annoyed about it the way you are annoyed by weather. It had no meaning. It was an interruption in an otherwise perfectly good month, and if you had asked me what it was for, I would have said nothing, obviously, some things are just inconvenient.

Then a woman I interviewed suggested I try writing with my left hand. And a few weeks later, at my kitchen table, in handwriting that looked like a six-year-old's, a sentence came through that changed how I see almost everything.

I would never have written with my left hand if my right one had been working.

So what was the injury for? At the time, nothing. Looking back, it was the whole door.

The scene that makes no sense.

You know this from films.

Somewhere in the middle, a scene arrives that does not fit. A character does something inexplicable. A thread appears, gets dropped, and you half forget it while the story moves on. If you paused it there and demanded to know what that scene meant, nobody could tell you. Not the director. It does not mean anything yet.

Then the last twenty minutes arrive and the whole thing reorganises itself, and the throwaway scene turns out to be the hinge everything swung on. You watch it again a year later and it is unbearably obvious, sitting there in plain sight the entire time.

Meaning is a function of the whole, and while you are in the middle, the whole does not exist yet.

We accept this completely at the cinema. We lose our minds about it in our own lives.

Life can only be understood backwards, and forwards is the only direction available.

Kierkegaard wrote it in his journal in 1843, and nobody has improved on it since.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

Both halves need each other. The first on its own is comforting and slightly passive, a promise that clarity arrives if you sit still long enough. The second is where it gets hard. Living forwards means acting before you understand, choosing before the pattern is visible, saying yes to things whose significance you cannot assess for another decade.

There is no version where you understand first and then live accordingly.

The understanding is made out of the living, the way you cannot review a book you have not read.

Which changes the shape of the frustration. Not knowing what this chapter is for is no failure of insight on your part. You are standing too close to something that only resolves at a distance.

So what do you steer by?

The body, I have come to think, and I say that as someone whose instinct was always to think her way through.

Around eighty percent of the fibres in the vagus nerve run upward, from body to brain, rather than down. Your body is reporting constantly and the mind is largely on the receiving end, which is close to the opposite of how most of us picture the arrangement.

Antonio Damasio spent years on what this means for decisions. In one well-known experiment, people played a card game with four decks, two of them secretly rigged to lose. Long before anyone could explain which decks were bad, their bodies had begun producing small stress responses as their hand reached toward them. The knowing showed up in the skin before it showed up in the sentence.

Something registers. Then the thinking mind arrives and does what it does. It explains, it reasons, it builds a sensible case for the safer option, and the case is often good enough to talk you out of what you already knew.

Which is why slowness matters, and not as a lifestyle preference. That first signal is quiet and it does not repeat itself loudly. If your days have no gaps in them, the rational mind will have written over the top of it before you noticed it was there. You will still make a decision. It will just be made entirely by the part of you that needs to justify things.

Living forwards means moving with something you cannot yet defend in an argument. That is uncomfortable, and it is most of what courage turns out to be.

Nothing back there is fixed.

Here is the part I keep telling people about, usually too enthusiastically.

Most of us imagine memory as storage. Something happens, it gets recorded, it sits in a drawer unchanged, and remembering means going to have a look at it.

That is not what happens. When you recall a memory it comes out and becomes chemically unstable for a window of time. Malleable. Then it gets put back, and what goes back in is subtly different from what came out. Neuroscientists call this reconsolidation, and it is ordinary functioning rather than a glitch.

Every act of remembering is also an act of rewriting.

Think of a story you tell about yourself, something from years ago you have recounted at dinner tables and to a therapist. That version is nowhere near the original. It has been through you dozens of times and each pass has moved an emphasis, sanded an edge.

Dan McAdams found the same thing from the psychological side. He asks people to tell their life as a story in chapters, then returns years later and asks again, and it is never the same story. The chapter called a catastrophe at twenty-five gets called an education at thirty-five. The villain becomes a person with their own difficult childhood. Nobody is lying. They simply know how it turned out now, and knowing the ending changes what the middle was.

He also found that people who eventually locate something redeeming in their hardest chapters tend to have better mental health than people whose hard chapters stay hard in the telling.

I want to be careful with that, and so is he. It turns into pressure fast. Into a demand that you produce a lesson from your grief, find the gift inside your loss, arrive at gratitude on a reasonable schedule.

Some things are just loss. Some chapters do not redeem, and the truthful telling is the one that stays difficult.

A story that refuses to tidy itself is allowed to exist, and some part of you always knows when it is being lied to.

Erik Erikson placed this work at the very end of his map of human development. The final task of a life, he thought, is looking back across the whole thing and seeing whether it coheres. It waits until there is a whole to look at.

The kindness in it.

I used to find all of this maddening. Now I find it merciful.

If meaning arrives late, I am released from an obligation I could never have met anyway. I do not have to know what this is for. I do not have to justify the season I am in, or extract a lesson from it in real time, or perform an understanding I have not earned.

I can just be in it, doing the next honest thing, trusting the vantage point will come.

And if the past gets rewritten every time I return to it, then nothing back there is sealed. The chapter I filed under failure is still open. It will look different from further away, and I will be the one doing the looking.

Which connects to something I wrote recently about how nothing means anything until you say so. If we are the ones assigning meaning, time is on our side. We get to keep assigning it for as long as we are here to look back.

What to do in the middle.

Not much, honestly. That is sort of the point. But a few things help.

Keep a record. Write it down, badly, without conclusions. Memory is an unreliable narrator with an agenda, and the version you write today is the only one that has not been edited by the version of you who knows how it ended.

Refuse to deliver the verdict early. The judgement you reach at the worst moment is the one most likely to harden, and it is almost always wrong about the size of things. Three in the morning is not a courtroom.

Do the next honest thing. Not the right thing, which requires knowing the plot. The next honest one, which only requires knowing yourself a little.

Let the answer be I do not know yet. When somebody asks what this period of your life is about, that is a complete sentence. It sounds like evasion and it is really just an accurate description of how understanding works.

I could not have told you what a hurt hand was for. It turned out to be how I learned to write with the other one.

What is a chapter of your life that meant something completely different once you were on the other side of it? I would love to hear.

Living forwards asks two things of us, and they are the heart of what I work on with people one to one.

Self trust, which is not certainty about where the path goes, just enough trust in yourself to take the next step without the map. And faith, which is not belief in a particular outcome, but a felt connection to something larger that is already at work, something we are inside of and cannot see the shape of yet. Both can be rebuilt, and when they are, the not knowing stops feeling like being lost.

If you are in the middle of something you cannot yet make sense of, this is exactly the work. You are welcome to explore 1:1 coaching with me, or book a discovery call and we can talk.

Further reading:

Søren Kierkegaard — Journals and Papers

Antonio Damasio — Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

Dan P. McAdams — The Redemptive Self

Erik Erikson — The Life Cycle Completed

Joan Didion — The Year of Magical Thinking