Backwards Understood

Some things only make sense in reverse

 

There's a peculiar magic in watching a movie backwards. The shattered glass reforms. The diver rises from the pool. The tears slide up cheeks and back into eyes. 

I started thinking about this after finding old photographs in my parents' basement. Jumbled moments from decades past, with no particular order or explanation. At first, they seemed random—disconnected snapshots lacking context. But as I arranged them chronologically, a story emerged that could only be understood by working backwards.

Perhaps that's true of most meaningful things. 

We don't understand the importance of childhood until we've left it. We don't grasp the value of health until after illness. We can't fully appreciate someone's presence until we've felt their absence. The meaning reveals itself in retrospect.

Time is the ultimate unreliable narrator. It shows us events in sequence but hides their significance until later chapters. Like reading a mystery novel with the reveal on the last page that suddenly makes you see every previous scene differently.

The French philosopher Kierkegaard once observed that "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." We're perpetually caught in this tension—moving forward while making sense of things by looking back.

Sometimes I wonder if regret is just the cost of this backwards understanding. The price we pay for clarity that comes too late to change our actions but just in time to change our perspective.

I'm learning to embrace this backwards logic. To accept that some puzzles aren't meant to be solved in real-time. That sometimes, the most profound realizations arrive after the experience has ended, not during it.

Maybe wisdom itself is backwards understood—not something we accumulate steadily with age, but something that sneaks up on us in moments of reflection, showing us what we knew all along without knowing we knew it.

Next time you find yourself confused by the present, remember: some stories read better in reverse. Some journeys make sense only after they're complete. Some questions answer themselves, given enough time.

And sometimes, that's exactly as it should be.

—Everett

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