What Time Teaches Us

I truly love this time of year, the threshold between the old year and the new. It’s a liminal space, the in-between. We’re no longer fully in the year that was, but we’re not yet in the one coming. For people who spend much of their time deciding, directing, and carrying responsibility, this pause can feel unfamiliar. It’s like being on a long plane ride, or stopping in the doorway, neither here nor there.

Even the calendar reflects this. January, named after Janus, the two-faced Roman deity of change and beginnings, has one face turned toward the past, the other toward the future. Transitions are never clean breaks. They’re more like suspensions between two realities.

Yet that’s not how this season usually feels. There’s so much focus on change: resolutions, promises, decisions, intentions. What often gets missed is the reality that transformation is rarely designed or decided. Most change, maybe all change, happens without planning at all.

We just get older.
We live through unexpected events, bad relationships, conflict, and loss.
We receive difficult feedback, or new opportunities open up and horizons expand in ways we didn’t anticipate.
And some change arrives as a realization, a thought, or a feeling that percolates and stirs in us long before we have language for it.

In fact, it’s remarkable to consider the profound leaps, the slow crawls, the major and minor transformations that occur without our guidance

C.S. Lewis wrote that we travel with our backs to the engine. As we move forward through life, we can only see where we’ve been, not what lies ahead. Retrospective vision is a kind of x-ray vision; it lets us see things we couldn’t see then, while we were struggling in midst of it all. It shows us where our judgment was off, where our fears were unfounded, and where we lingered too long in a life we had outgrown. Looking back at the receding tracks of time, what do you see now that you couldn’t see then?

What problem, that once looked insurmountable, no longer feels like one? What did you spend energy resisting that eventually became the right path? What were you right about early on, but didn’t trust at the time?

Who or what have you influenced in ways you may not have appreciated at the time? When did you confuse effort with effectiveness? Where did you assume responsibility that was never really yours? Where did you avoid responsibility that, in hindsight, actually was?

What skin have you outgrown? What role once protected you but later confined you? What part of yourself did you keep hidden, or shy away from, because it seemed impractical, risky, or inconvenient? What did you think you needed to prove that you no longer do?

What do you have more patience for now, and what do you have less patience for? What could only be learned slowly? What did time, rather than insight or effort, ultimately resolve?

What do you regret, and what can you forgive? What mistake still taught you something worthwhile? What choice do you wish had gone differently, but made sense given who you were at the time?

What group, or type of person, have you outgrown? Where do you belong now? Who matters most? Who did you try too hard to impress? What have you learned about the difference between being respected and being liked?

Before jumping in with resolutions and intentions, it’s helpful to acknowledge the growth that has already happened. Looking back exposes our progress, but also our errors: where our assumptions were off, our strategies less effective, our effort misdirected. That brings a humility that can help us set intentions that are more accurate, more calibrated to reality, and more grounded in what we know about how change really happens.

Years ago, for an end-of-year newsletter, I asked fifty people, from age 13 to 88, this question: what’s the one thing you know now that you wish you had known when you were younger? I want to close with my favorite response, because it speaks to this idea that change happens to us, and our task is to tune in.

“Hormones are more powerful than you think, and they influence many important life decisions. I would have liked to know that.”

I find this oddly comforting. It reminds me that not all change is strategic, intentional, or even conscious. Some change arrives through insight. Some arrives through experience. And some arrives through chemistry. And all of it counts.

Wishing you all the best for the year to come, and a wise reckoning with the year that was.