One Step Back

When we think of our lives, we tend to remember the wonderful times first: when we succeeded, when we felt loved, when we felt happiness. We tend to put the tougher times, when we failed, or felt lost, into the back of our mind and sometimes have trouble remembering the details of those events. In the long game, though, we fly and we fall at different times, and these are just steps we take on our journey. Because we tend to be hardwired for ‘good’ things, we tend to look at our failures, however large or small they may be, as bad things. The reality of a journey, however, is that a step backward is simply that: ONE step backward. That step back does not erase all of the steps we too forward to reach our current destination.

To keep perspective on this idea, think of learning to read and to write. When we first look at a printed page, it may look like a series of black dots and lines, but as we begin to learn the alphabet, we begin to see a particular order. We may not yet understand that order, or how to interpret it, but we needed to see those black lines and dots in order to reach the next step of seeing the individual letters as well as how they are grouped to form words. From the recognition of individual words, comes the cognizance of seeing them arranged in ideas and thoughts, which is the stage that we begin to actually read what was heretofore a mystery to us. Along that simplified passage, we come across things that confuse us, that we mispronounce as we read aloud, that we don’t understand, and these, too, are just steps forward.

What we forget as adults, as we become more knowledgeable, is that each step has been accomplished as just one part of a larger task, and that as we go forward, if we need to take a step back, that it does not erase all the forward steps we took to reach that point. As adults, we tend to look at learning as something we did in our past, and now that we are grown-up, we should already know this. Which begs the question of why should we know this? Anyone who has been taught to read as a teenager or an adult can identify with the struggle to learn to read; for them, however, this is a passage into living a fully functioning life that is truly new to them. They knew they might have trouble learning this, and knew they had to work hard to learn this new skill. It is the mindset of someone who knows what they know, but more importantly, knows what they don’t know, and that it may not be easy. They don’t see a step back—to learn past or future tense, for example—as something bad, but as yet another step taken to better understanding.

We all continue to learn new things as we progress through life, be it academic, athletic, artistic, and simply letting go of the idea of ‘at my age, I should know this…,’ will open us up to many new things that bring us to new levels of understanding. Even for those things we already know, new insight and awareness come with seeing things from a different perspective.