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The Importance of Retrospectives

If you’ve ever looked out of a car on a highway, you’ll notice that everything seems to move past in a blur - you can’t really make sense of anything you are seeing. However, if you lean out and look back, you can see everything clearly, in high definition. You can see the green of the fields, the dusty grey of the roads, the blinding white of the wheel rims; everything.

Life is somewhat like that car on the highway. The thing with life is, it’s really hard to see the present clearly. One second you’re joining kindergarten, crying in your mother’s arms, the next you’re graduating from college, your mother crying silently in yours. Just like with the car, looking back i.e. retrospection is easy. Things seem clearer, your path here is visible, you know what happened to lead you here. Past decisions seem obvious and past mistakes seem idiotic. c Why am I trying to make such “philosophical” statements? Well I’m trying to use it to make a point (duh.) We’ve all been through phases in life where we don’t know what we’re doing, where everything seems out of our control. Some who like to do this voluntarily call it going with the flow. I am one of those who ask, “How the hell did I get here?” That’s where retrospection comes in.

Connecting the dots when the dots are still being revealed to you is nearly impossible. But connecting the dots after they’ve all been revealed and you’ve moved on to another image? That helps you make sense of the image you’re working on currently. In going back and figuring out causalities, one begins to see the bigger picture. Now you aren’t focusing on the one image, but a collection of images that define you and your life. This perspective helps you remember why you’ve done what you’ve done and what you need to do now to stay consistent with the larger collection. It helps you break this flow of involuntariness and re-take control of your dreams, your path, and your choices.

Another thing I love about retrospection is you almost always get a different view of things - if you’re willing to be open minded. Using the car metaphor, we make assumptions about our state, the correctness of decisions, and about the people we meet based on what we see currently - though it’s blurry, and though we don’t have complete information. Looking back allows us to rectify all that with the complete information we may have gained. This in turn both improves us as a person, reminding us of our fallibility, and improves our ability to make the correct assumptions from partial information as it expands our experience and knowledge.

However painful looking at the past may be, it’s always important to look back and remind yourself of how much of the journey you’ve already completed. It’s important to figure out what erros in judgement you made in the past. Keeping that in mind, I propose we take 15 minutes each week to look back, connect our experiences of the week to our past, and to keep reminding ourselves of the bigger picture. Look back and see what shaped you into who you are and decide how you want to shape yourself in the future. Retrospect, and introspect.

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