Kierkegaard’s Most Powerful Truth I Try to Live By
Kierkegaardian mantra for your best life.
Life is one big absurdity. You and I accumulate experiences every day. Some don’t make sense at first. We question our choices. We doubt our path forward. So we are tempted to look back for the missing pieces. But a perfect reality doesn’t exist. The pain, the joy, the suffering all happening at once doesn’t mean we should always look for answers. Of course, you want to understand why you took that path. You won’t understand it now.
Maybe you never will. But that’s okay.
According to the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, “life can only be understood backwards, it must be lived forwards.” But you can’t live life looking in the rearview mirror. Hindsight knowledge is a lesson, but reality is always now.
“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 [to do this]: going backwards.” — Søren Kierkegaard…
