Have you ever gone through a very hard time in your life? Maybe you lost a job, a relationship ended, or you failed at a big project. At that moment, you probably felt confused, angry, or sad. You might have asked yourself, “Why is this happening to me?” Everything felt like a messy puzzle with missing pieces.
But then, a year or two later, you look back at that same difficult time. Suddenly, everything looks different. You think, “Ah, I see now. I had to lose that job to find this better one,” or “That failure taught me what I really needed to know.”
This feeling is very common. It seems that life’s biggest lessons only become clear after the difficult part is over. A famous man named Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.”
Why does our brain work this way? Why can’t we see the lesson while we are learning it? Let’s explore the simple psychology behind why clarity only comes in retrospect.
Living inside the Maze
Imagine life is a giant hedge maze. When you are standing inside the maze, all you can see are tall green walls. You don’t know if you should turn left or right. You might choose a path that leads to a dead end, and you have to turn around. You feel frustrated and lost.
This is what it feels like to live in the “present moment.” When you are in the middle of a problem, you are inside the maze. You do not have all the information. You are making guesses based on what is right in front of you.
Your brain is also busy dealing with strong emotions. Fear, worry, and stress act like a fog. They make it hard to think clearly. When your brain is in “survival mode,” it is focused on getting through the day, not on learning a big life lesson. You are too close to the problem to see the solution.
The Science of “Hindsight”
Now, imagine that enough time has passed, and you have finally found your way out of the maze. You climb up a tall tower and look down. From up high, the maze looks very simple. You can clearly see the start, the finish, and the exact path you took. You can also see all the wrong turns you made and why they were wrong.
This view from the tower is called “retrospect.” In psychology, there is something called hindsight bias. This is a fancy term for the feeling that “I knew it all along.”
Once your brain knows the ending of a story, it tricks you. It goes back into your memory and deletes the confusion you felt at the time. It highlights only the clues that point to the final outcome. It makes the past look like a straight, obvious line, even though it felt like a messy scribble when you were living it.
Think of a child’s “connect-the-dots” drawing. When there are just numbered dots on a page, you don’t know what the picture is. You have to draw the lines, one by one, from 1 to 2 to 3. Only when you connect the final dot does the full picture appear. You cannot see the picture before you draw the lines. Life is the same. You have to live through the events—connect the dots—before you can see the lesson.
A Story About a Bridge
Let’s look at a simple story. A man named Leo wanted to build a small wooden bridge over a stream in his backyard. He had never built a bridge before.
While he was building it, Leo was very stressed. He worried that the wood wasn’t strong enough. He wasn’t sure if the supporting stones were in the right spots. He made mistakes; sometimes the wood would crack, or a stone would slip. He felt like a bad builder and wanted to quit many times. He was “inside the maze.”
A year later, the bridge was finished and standing strong. Leo stood on top of it and looked down. In retrospect, everything was clear. He could see that the wood cracked because he didn’t drill a pilot hole first. He saw that the stone slipped because the ground was too wet that day.
The lessons were obvious now because the work was done. In the moment, he was fighting the problems. In retrospect, he was studying the results. The confusion he felt back then was just the necessary process of learning how to build.
How to Trust the Process
So, what can we do with this information? It is important to be kind to yourself when things are tough.
Don’t beat yourself up for not knowing the future. It is impossible to know the lesson before you have finished the experience. Trust that the confusion you feel right now is normal. It does not mean you are failing; it just means you are still connecting the dots.
Be patient in the messy middle. Keep moving forward, even if you don’t know exactly where you are going. One day, you will look back from your own tower, and it will all make perfect sense. The clarity is coming; it is just waiting for you at the end of the path.
