I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
In a private journal entry, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is said to have written, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” But this is apparently a paraphrase.
More fully, he wrote:
It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position: going backwards.
In his article on this quote, Jack Maden writes that the unknowability of the future leaves us living under great uncertainty, with implications for how we might live. Instead of planning and problem-solving, we should instead seek to fully experience its unfolding:
We do not (and will never) have the information required to forever ‘fix’ our lives — so why approach them as problems that need to be solved at all?
No matter what we do, reality will continually unfold before us. We can fight against this with plans, schemes, narrative arcs; but reality won’t care — for, in-itself, it doesn’t have any problems to solve. Reality invincibly goes on.
Perhaps, then, we might adjust our perspectives accordingly: put our energy not into endless reflection whereby we ‘fix’ the past or ‘solve’ the future, but in aligning better with what the very structure of existence demands: experience the unfolding of reality now.
Instead of trying to arrange for the best possible outcome through careful cost-benefit analysis and planning, we might instead follow our interest and inspiration, writes Maden:
All else being equal, rather than exhaust ourselves on yet more research, cost-benefit analyses, and guesses at our future happiness, the most rational approach is to opt for the path we’re more interested in discovering. Instead of ‘fixing’ the future, we focus on the value of revelation.
After all, life is here to be experienced. What kind of experiences appeal to you? Spending time with loved ones? Expressing your creativity? Feeling the sun on your face?
This is a core existentialist idea, that we are blessed and cursed with radical freedom to choose who we might become and what our lives might look like (though we only get to choose our actions, not the outcomes that flow from them).
In my book manuscript which I haven’t put time into for weeks, I have a chapter on “unfolding over planning.” I’ve seen on the midlife dating subreddits I lurk on many people stating up front what they want from a partner and relationship before they’ve met even a single person. They ask, “How do I find this exact thing I think I want?” Instead, I propose, they should be open to many possibilities for their future, for what kind of person they might meet, and what kind of relationship might suit them.
One woman wrote something like this:
I ended a ten-year marriage over a year ago and feel ready to start dating. I’d love to meet someone the old-fashioned way, but I’m willing to try online dating. I don’t want a friends-with-benefits situation or a one-night stand. I want an intimate, affectionate, monogamous, long-term, committed, living-apart-together relationship. I want to move slowly, take time, and build something deep. I won’t sleep with someone for at least three months. I don’t want to get together more than two to four times a month.
This, to me, is a recipe for dissatisfaction in dating and romance. You don’t find a good relationship by analyzing your wants a priori and then going out and finding something that conforms to them. There aren’t that many people in the world, living near you, with whom you might share emotional and physical attraction (to me, the two keys to a relationship that works). To assume that you can find that and enforce your vision of a relationship onto them — for example “I only want to meet up two to four times a month” — will likely doom you to failure. At the same time, it will keep you from experiencing possibilities that look nothing like you imagined that might be sustaining and enriching to you.
Similarly, people will very explicitly and specifically detail what features and life history they want their partner to have, as with this widower:
Background: 72 year old cradle Catholic widower. Married 45 years, widowed 2 years. Lost his wife to cancer. Has 5 grown children and 13 grandchildren.
What he is seeking: a Catholic widow who is active in the Catholic church, has been married only once before, and has living children.
Most commenters in the thread point out he’s more likely to get contacted by spammers than find anyone meeting these three criteria who is interested in dating him. I understand that his religion is so important to him he feels he must find someone like this (Catholics don’t allow divorced people to marry, for example). Further, he doesn’t want to be a sole caregiver for someone going through a health crisis, as he had to with his late wife. But by refusing to meet the possibilities life provides and instead thinking he can enforce his vision onto it, he is likely ensuring he will never find love again.
Instead, why not be open to the unfolding possibilities that life presents to you, both in terms of your partner’s qualities and the kind of relationship you might form with someone?
I don’t think either Ray or I expected to experience the love and connection that’s unfolding between us. Last night we celebrated our six-month anniversary at a wine bar in Golden. We talked about how we feel like family to each other already. “But,” I told him, “it’s the best kind of family.” That’s because not only do we support each other and help each other like family, we also have the kind of emotional and physical intimacy that you only get in a romantic relationship. We chose each other for this.
After my last serious relationship ended in 2023, I imagined I might be permanently single. I was tired of online dating, tired of relationships that left me feeling alienated from myself. By contrast, living without a partner was refreshing. I didn’t expect to spend two years committed to singlehood, but it was an important period in which I refound myself after too long away.
When my mother moved out of my house into a senior living facility, I reactivated my online dating accounts. I didn’t decide up front what I was looking for: someone my own age and with my educational level? A living apart together relationship? Remarriage? I did hope to find someone to ski with, but I never made that a dealbreaker such that if someone didn’t ski I wouldn’t consider him.
I was lucky. Ray was the first man I met in person after getting back on the online dating apps. He was older than I thought would work for me, and that concerned me at the beginning, but I kept myself open to the possibilities that life was putting in front of me. I didn’t look backwards to my past to determine if someone twelve years older would be right for me. I didn’t think “I want to get married again,” or “I want a living apart together relationship,” or “I will only settle for a man who is at least six feet tall.” I just experienced the future as it came to me.
Then the future arrived and it was far more wonderful than I could have ever dreamed of or planned for.
My father is in a rehab facility after coming down with the flu and taking a bad fall. He was in the hospital for six days and is now working towards returning home to his senior living apartment that he shares with his long-time partner.
I received a phone call Friday night from his partner; she was frantic and panicked.
“Your father has fallen; he needs to go to the hospital — you need to take him there.”
I told her I was coming immediately and didn’t even stop to ask why she hadn’t called an ambulance. I called on my way over to ask and she said the EMT who was with my dad thought I could take him. But by the time I arrived at his apartment the ambulance was on its way.
My dad told me this morning, “I feel like I’m in an alternate universe, since the fall, it’s nothing like the life I was living.”
The future doesn’t always unfold in the ways we want, but it always unfolds.
What is next for my dad? I don’t know. I think “maybe he will bounce back to where he was before, maybe even better when he realizes what’s at stake.” But I can’t predict it, I can only live forward into it.