Backward

Cliche might not be the kindest term... perhaps "fatigued idiom" would be a bit more generous.

Either way, I'm going to try to avoid saying "forward-looking" any time that I possibly can. We can chalk it up to my deep aversion to using impossible expressions.

Truth be known, there is no such thing as "forward looking".

No matter what we do or try, the future remains dark. That unnerves most of us, and as myriads of schemes across millennia of human culture across the globe can attest, we'd love to have things be otherwise. But, it's not. If it were, the stock market would be a vastly different place.

The fact of the matter is that we're all "backward-looking", no matter how hard we try to look "forward".

Like rowers locked into position, we can only see things as they come into being next to us and hold them in view for a while as they recede toward the horizon of where we've come from.

We have ideas about what might happen, but those anticipations live in the "now" of our thinking. They don't really look forward. They imagine about the future in our immediate experience.

In other words, our "forward" view is really just part of our "now" thinking.

Of course, even if we can recognize this logically, we can't stop anticipating in actual practice. We humans have a nagging sense about this thing we call "the future" and we keep running into it. The difficulty is that when the "future" becomes our "now," it rarely ends up looking and feeling the way that we imagined before we got to it.

Our surprise when that happens can make us feel foolish, and maybe a bit exposed or vulnerable. We didn't get it "right" when we imagined it 'way back then. That surprise often makes us nervous about the "future",... which spurs us to try to find better ways of "looking forward",... which usually end up at similar surprises,... which make us feel a bit foolish, and maybe exposed or vulnerable... and so on, and so on.

That's a pretty strong cycle.

I'm not saying that anticipations are bad.  I'm saying that it's really easy to get lost in our imaginations about what could be and lose a grip on our "nows."

If we let that happen, there's a good chance we'll sell out our real, "now" lives for imagined "future" ones that don't really exist, and probably never will.

That's a poor trade, because we give up what we really have, our "now", in exchange for something that always stays forward, "out there" in the future.

Trading "now" for "then" is even less of a deal when trying to lock-down the future requires us to compromise the important things that presently make life full and meaningful. That happens when we sacrifice who we can be in our now's in order to satisfy our "forward-looking" anticipations.

One simple way to break out of the "forward-looking" trap is to identify and hold tenaciously to what you know to be true and valuable now.

For example, you probably know how people deserve to be treated now. Instead of fudging on that, treat people rightly, even if doing something else offers you some possible, imagined gain later. If you do so, you've lived well now. You didn't sell out your now for an imagined then.

Another way is to embrace a "backward-looking" stance. That stance looks honestly at what's around you and what has happened before, engaging it with a learning posture. It's a view that examines what's really going on or what has really happened and makes real, meaningful changes in real time.

Look around you, right now. Are there things to enjoy, appreciate and learn from, right now? See them, right at this moment. Explore them, revel in them, learn from them. Then, remember them and draw from your experience of them as they pass you by. It's a lot more fun than trying to peer into the future...

and the view is much clearer.