Reversing in the Day
Reversing is one of the key practices of the work I teach. As a practice, reversing is done each night as the last thing before falling asleep. Simply, it is a looking back through your day backwards (for a video with full instructions on how to reverse click here). However, as you become familiar to the practice of reversing, you can reverse during the day to gain clarity on events. Here is a story of me reversing during the day, and the treasures that it yielded.
At dawn the other morning I was walking my dogs in the neighborhood. The sun was just beginning to come up, and the light was still faint. I see ahead of me a young man pouring a large container of oil on the ground. In less than a second I think of all the times I have seen “street mechanics” in my neighborhood pouring oil down the gutters, which drain straight into the ocean, despite the city’s attempts to curtail the practice. I scream at the guy “HEY! That’s illegal!” I hear back, “It was an accident”, but I see he’s holding the container upside down and oil is still pouring out. So I yell at him again “HEY! You can’t do that – it’s illegal!!!” I hear back “It was an accident!!” But on the heels of his shout I yell again “You’re still pouring it out!!! How can that be an accident??”
At this point I’ve come up as close as I can with my dogs, and I see he has oil all over his pants, but his shoulder is toward me and I see him still pouring oil. He yells one last time that it was an accident and, frustrated, I stomp off picturing in my mind a man I had seen once changing the oil to his car on my street and pouring an entire quart in the gutter overlaid with images of dead fish in the Bay.
Then I turn the corner. Literally and figuratively.
On the next street I took a pause. I don’t like confrontation, and always seek to resolve it. The heaviness of the misunderstanding was weighing on me, and I thought about he and I continuing to repeat the same words over and over without saying something different – a red flag. So I took a moment to consider his words – it was an accident. Was it? Could it have been?
I stopped right there and reversed – looking back over the situation backwards. This time I go backwards and in my examination I see the oil on his pants and then I look carefully at the bottle he was holding. I “See” for the first time, clearly, that both ends of the bottle were broken off. In my original viewing I had thought he was pouring the oil out, but in my careful reversing I see that he was simply holding a bottle out away from him to keep the rest of it from spilling on his clothes, and that with both ends broken it didn’t matter how he held it, the oil was coming out. It was, in fact, an accident.
So I came back around the corner. “Hey”, I said more softly. He backed up a little – I don’t blame him. So I called out: “I’m sorry! I heard you say it was an accident but I was thinking of other times when it hasn’t been and so I didn’t listen. I see now that the bottle is broken.” At this I realize he’s only about 19 years old, and upset, on the verge of tears. He replies back to me “It’s all over my pants.” I asked him if he had other pants to change into – he didn’t – and if there was any way to shield it from his skin. He put some plastic down his pants and tried to wipe his hands off. I told him again how sorry I was. He said “That’s ok, it was an accident.” I said “I know that now.” And then he says back to me “I’m sorry, too – I thought you were a …” And I helped him out: “A mean lady?” I was laughing. That gave him a smile. He said, “Yeah.” I told him I WAS being a mean lady, but that I had come back to myself. Then I asked if I could help, but he told me his boss would be coming to the worksite in a few minutes and could drive him somewhere to clean up.
Clean up his accident, as I had just cleaned up mine.
When we race forward in our assumptions and expectations we narrow our field of vision – literally. By reversing we change our view point, the perspective from which we look at the same event. Doing so allows us to see things we missed the first, narrow time around.
So if you haven’t started yet, try Reversing as a nightly practice. Once you do it long enough to become a habit you will find you might reach for it as a tool in your daytime.
