"It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life can only be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards."

—Søren Kierkegaard, Journals (1843)

Self-will tends to live backward—reviewing what happened, rehearsing what was said, constructing explanations for how things came to be the way they are. There is a genuine desire to understand in this. But understanding, arrived at backward, does not tell us how to step into what is coming. The next moment can only be met forward, which means into uncertainty.

That tension may not be resolvable. We may be creatures who understand in one direction and must live in another. What might soften, gradually, is the insistence that we must fully understand before we can fully move. The step forward does not wait for the retrospective to be complete. It simply asks to be taken.