Which Way Are You Facing
Facing forward is a habit, not a kind of person, and it is the habit that helps most when things change.
A car has a big windshield and a small mirror. That isn’t an accident. You need the mirror, and you’d be in danger without it. But you check it in glances, and you spend almost all of your time looking through the glass in front of you. Try to drive with your eyes fixed on the mirror and you won’t get far.
After something big changes in your life, it’s easy to end up driving by the mirror. A job ends. A friend drifts off. You move, or someone leaves. For a while, all your thinking points back. What happened, what you should have said, how things used to be. That’s normal, and everyone does it for a while. Everyone looks back. What matters is which way you’re facing a month later.
My teacher, Dr. Bob Melamede, had names for the two directions. He called them forward-looking and backward-looking. I want to be careful with those words, because they are easy to misuse. They are not two kinds of people. They are two ways of facing, and every person faces both ways at different times, often in the same week. I spent a good part of my own life facing backward, holding on to things that were already gone, mostly to protect my pride. Nobody is stuck facing one way for good, including people who have been facing backward for years.
Two rules are at work here, rule four and rule three.
First, rule four. You can only push now, and every push goes forward. Looking back can teach you a lot. The mirror shows you what you just passed and what’s coming up behind. But it can’t steer. When the past has a lesson in it, take the lesson and turn around. When you notice you’ve stared at the same spot in the mirror a hundred times, it has stopped teaching you anything. Now it’s only taking your eyes off the road.
Second, rule three. Whatever you feed, grows, and the way you face is a kind of feeding. Replay the old days and you wear that path a little deeper. That’s why facing backward tends to stick. The longer you face that way, the easier it gets to keep facing that way. The good news is that it works in the other direction too. Every time you ask a forward question, even a tiny one, the forward path gets a little easier to find.
Facing forward doesn’t mean having a big plan. You don’t need to know where you’ll be in five years. You need the next small thing. What could I try tomorrow? Who could I call this week? What would I like to be true by Friday? Those questions are small, but they point you the right way.
And facing forward doesn’t mean pretending the past didn’t matter. It mattered. It made you. You carry all of it with you, the way a good driver carries every mile of road they have learned. You just don’t steer by it.
Try this for a week.
Set three alarms on your phone for odd times of day. When one goes off, notice where your mind just was. Behind you, right here, or ahead. Make a mark in one of three columns. Don’t judge it, just count. When the mark goes in the “behind” column, add one small forward question before you put the phone away: what’s one thing I could try next? At the end of the week, look at your columns and see which way you’ve been facing.
One line to remember
Glance in the mirror. Drive through the windshield.
