Why do we reflect?

By Mathangi

The older we get, time just flies by before we have had any chance to process anything that’s happened. Hours turned to days, days to months, and soon you’ve found yourself 2 years into a pandemic. While we have Instagram or our photo galleries to remind us of the highlights of our year, what about the lows? Apart from surviving a global hit, what have we overcome or outgrown from this year?

At the start of this year, I received a 2021 planner for my mum, meant to keep me on track with my daily tasks and activities. But from my experience with years 2019 and 2020, a planner just doesn’t work for me (or well, the other way around). It is mainly because I don’t like carrying a big notebook around with me and most of the time I just use an online calendar to organise everything. So, having been wanting to cultivate the habit of journaling for the longest time, I decided to use the planner as a journal instead, filling up the 6-8 lines allocated each day to just write down my thoughts and feelings about the day, or any sudden need for reflection when my mind is all over the place.

Having just moved to another country to further my studies, all the new experiences have given me much room for reflection of my own culture and interactions with new people. I am generally a huge overthinker so writing it all out has often given me the space to see things as they are - the rational picture. So yes, I don’t really need to get new shoes just because the ones I have on right now don’t look as aesthetic (but are super comfy); people actually spend so much more time staring at themselves when we turn our Zoom cameras on; and really, in the great expanse of things, you need to find your own thoughts and feelings important before anyone else has the chance to place value on them.

Reflection, like minimalism - a theme we explored last month, is about spending time to truly dig deep and understand yourself without the noise of distractions or social media telling you what you should do and who you should be. It is about being true to yourself. Not writing down things you would put in your CV or things you’d tell a kiasu friend, but rather it’s processing the hard-hitting fears, mistakes and rejections that keep you up at night staring at the ceiling and replaying moments over and over again. The things that keep you from spending an entirely free day doing something productive, because avoiding the issue means your mind has not come to a conclusion. I’ve once heard that you can stop an annoying song from playing in your head by listening to the ending. It’s the same with reflections. I’ve found myself feeling much better by writing things out and seeing my thoughts laid out (honestly sometimes I just go - “What is wrong with you bro”), and with that last sentence ending the page with a plan and a reassuring ‘it’ll be okay’, there is a sense of finality and resolve to my problems.

Reflection is not easy. It takes time. A lot of starting and stopping to collect your thoughts and string them into something coherent. But that’s the process that helps. The jumbled mess in your mind becomes an organised mess. And now you also have a piece of work you can look back on many years on, and see how you’ve grown as a person.