Use Future Hindsight to Deal with Today
In the book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard, the author recounts her journey as a child observing fungus and eating dirt through to her career in forestry and academic research. Early in her career and shortly after the tragic death of her brother, critiques of her research publications are brought against her. She dismisses their arguments and doesn't take them seriously out of naiveté and a host of other reasons. Essentially, she writes, she retreats from the conflict. “Instead, I backed away, ducked under, hid beneath. I wanted children, and I needed time with Dan [her husband at the time] to be at peace, to learn, to like myself again. I needed to grieve. I needed to work on something less fraught, so I turned my attention to other worries of the forest…” (page 175). The book is about the forest, so the story continues with another research experiment she conducts with a colleague. She sweeps past what was months or likely years of emotional wrestling and self doubt. “I was just a young woman...I knew nothing” she says of herself in that academic debate. Just a few sentences summarize a complex mixture of emotions, life events, and aspirations.
If she were journalling about her situation as it happened, I doubt she would have been able to succinctly assess her mindset. At the time, she is living in a confusing, complex set of challenges and competing priorities. The whole reason she ignores the critiques of her work is because she doesn't have clear perspective on the entire arc of her career. I’m not here to discuss her choices about where she put her focus and what she ignored, nor the consequences that held for her. What I’d like to draw attention to is that she sweeps up in a few sentences what was probably months of emotional difficulty. Those few sentences cannot convey what was really going on.
The eloquent sentences not only explain away an error in judgment, they also justify her behaviour in a way that appears simple and straightforward, suggesting that her decision is reflective and deliberate. Her path forward looks obvious, despite this fork that unexpectedly appears. That’s not true to her experience at the juncture, however, because life is never like that. She probably felt emotional angst or inner chaos in the moment, yet we find minimal evidence of those emotions in her recounting. That evidence is absent because she’s not writing in this phase of her life, but of this phase of her life.
As readers, however, we reflect on our own messy and disordered life, and we wonder why it’s so easy for everyone else, why we’re the only one going through a forest with no path. We look at someone like Suzanne Simard and all her accomplishments and think, “She figured out what was right for her life, why can’t I?!”
When we read someone’s experience about a tumultuous time, we’re (usually) reading about their memory of the time, not of the time itself. At the very least, we’re reading a highly curated version that went through drafts, edits, editors, test readers, and publishers before it got to us. We benefit from their recollection. They’ve had time to reflect on the event with temporal distance and gain perspective from the larger picture, and it’s this larger picture they are sharing, not the in-the-moment lived experience.
We exist in messy, complex circumstances. It's only in hindsight, knowing the outcomes and distancing oneself from the tough emotions that we can make sense of anything—and sometimes not even then. If you find yourself in such a place, where, like Suzanne Simard, you’re dealing with a tragedy, just trying to survive the day to day, struggling to keep relationships together, and then something else like a strong critique of your work also cries for your attention, you probably don’t have a calm, wise perspective about how to handle the demands. That’s normal and completely acceptable. Don’t stress about the stress.
Instead, take whatever turmoil that you're mucking through and imagine yourself twenty years into the future. Imagine you’re writing a memoir of your own. What is the three sentence summary that your future self will use to describe this situation? How will they see this? As a blip on the radar? A pivotal moment? Forgettable? You have agency here! Pick up and adopt that hindsight perspective now. Use it as a guide to direct your decisions. This is a coaching strategy to envision your future as a way to inform your present.
“Don’t stress about the stress.”
Consider:
What is truly worth focussing on and paying attention to?
What might you let go of worrying about?
How can you focus on what’s most important to you right now?
Listen to the advice of that future self who survives and gains wisdom from these scars. Suzanne Simard survived her grief and navigated the challenges of marriage and family and came through a battle over her research findings. It gave her knowledge and perspective she couldn’t obtain without the experience.
Two more coaching questions:
What does your successful outcome look like?
What's the first action you can take to move towards it?
Take that step. One at a time.