Listening to Road Noise: Reflecting on things

What do you reflect on? Not that I’m being nosy. I think a better question to ask is when you reflect, what aspect gets you the most? I think that’s a deeper question, one that means more in the long run. Don’t you think?

We all have things that we have to stop and look back at. We weigh the rights and wrongs of our actions or inaction, and those of the people around us. We look back and see hints and clues, we see flaws in ourselves, our cohorts, and our situation. That part is easy, I think, to look back and see all the matters of circumstance. It’s easy, at least for me, to whisk back into the emotions of the moment and feel all over again, the joy or the pain, or not. Or to look on with detachment as events role on in the theater of memory.

There in lies the danger in reflection. The part where you see yourself and others without the cloud of emotion. You don’t see through rash things, hazing judgement, things like anger, or love, or adrenaline, or sadness. You just see events for what they were, sometimes seeing all the different roads that the journey could have taken. For many when we do look back in that way, we form regrets, we yearn to say ‘I’m sorry’, or have them said to us. For many, we see all of our failings when we look back, and not wanting to appear less to ourselves, we opt not to. Or at least not to so deeply.

Does it make sense to look back and never see? What kind of delusional dementia can be brrought upon ourselves, if we always look but never take to heart. Never try to judge ourselves, for ourselves, and try to learn from our own experiences, seen through the filter of maturity and the buffer of time? What if we never take responsibility? What if we never admit our wrongs or take triumph in our rights?

For many, one of the reason we decline to reflect, it that we don’t want to see how far we have come from where we started. We don’t want to look back and see our ideal self and wonder where we went, how we got here, how we got all broken and damaged.

But that’s how we grow, and the little cracks that make us, make us better don’t they? That’s how we know the different flavors of pain we have tastes, and appreciate all the shades of joy that we have experienced. In the end, peace may lie in reflection, what do you think?