To Move Forward, We Need to Look Back

This blog post is an adapted extract from a talk given by Ben Holloway. You can find the full talk below.

Sometimes to move forward, we need to look back. We need to become aware of the issues and problems in the first place.

Now I’m a bit of a sucker for time travel films. Back to the Future, Twelve Monkeys, Edge of Tomorrow, Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home... the list goes on!

But the one that popped into my head when I was writing this talk was a film called About Time. Without spoiling it too much, it’s about a son who learns that the men in his family have inherited the ability to travel back in time, to the moments they have lived before. One of the sub plots is about him constantly returning to one of his memories with his father who has died from cancer - he keeps looping back to the same memory, again and again. Unable to move on.

And what if we can be like that too? We can become trapped, so to speak, by the messages we received as children, the unspoken scripts we now live by, the way we’re programmed to react certain ways, trapped by traumatic moments and memories.

These things can be so deeply ingrained in us - and I definitely include myself in this - that it affects our habits, behaviours, our thinking, our relationships - potentially every facet of how we live out our lives.