Lived forward, understood backward

There’s a line of Kierkegaard’s I keep coming back to:

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

The ironic tragedy of it is that the understanding always arrives too late to help with the living. You make the decision in the fog, and the map only prints afterward.

I used to find that bleak. Lately it reads more like permission. If clarity is only ever going to show up in the rearview, then the forward part — the messy, guessing, hopeful part — doesn’t have to be done perfectly. It just has to be done.

So that’s the small idea behind the opening animation here, and behind the journal itself: write things down forward, while they’re still uncertain, so that the backward understanding has something to look at later.

:)