Remember yourself a year ago

Mental time travel creates a sense of forward motion

My kids went back to school this week. The start of the school year — coming as it does with the changing seasons, and the slanting light — always gives me a sense of time passing. Children move up a grade, and so you can see progress in their lives.

Adult life features less obvious change. In many ways that is good. It would be exhausting to change jobs or towns or, worse, relationships all the time! But day to day, all this sameness can make us feel like we’re just treading water. It can be hard to feel any sense of forward motion.

If that is the case, a little mental time travel might help. Zoom out on a larger time frame, and you might see more progress.

8760 hours

I like traveling a year (8760 hours). Picture your life during the back-to-school season last year. What were you doing? What was consuming your time? What were you hoping and planning for?

Maybe you moved recently. You feel like you’ve still got a lot of boxes sitting around. But a year ago you hadn’t even found your current house or sold your old one yet. That’s a lot of motion in a year! You’ll get to the boxes eventually.

In my case, I’ve sometimes been feeling slow as I’m training for a half-marathon. But a year ago I didn’t know I was crashing toward a back injury that left me unable to walk for a while, let alone run. The fact that I can do 9-plus mile training runs this fall is significant progress.

What changes

Now, to be sure, it’s possible things moved in the other direction. We can always backtrack on goals. But probably not all of them. No doubt you have learned something or achieved something in the past year, even if you’ve had some setbacks.

So take a moment to picture yourself a year ago, and then think about the ways in which you are different, and about any problems that are no longer so vexing. I am sure there is something.

Thinking of this progress can make the next year feel hopeful too. In a year, you can be looking back, thinking of how far you’ve come from now. If it’s happened before, it can happen again! Mental time travel makes that clear.