time, in order to discover the truth of yourself and your life.
What really happened? Why did it happen? What did it do to
me? What did it mean to me? In this way, one locates and ap-
pro priates the knowledge one needs or, more precisely, recov-
ers what one knew but had forgotten, and becomes, in Goethe’s
phrase, the hammer rather than the anvil.
Kaplan stated it forcefully: “The habit of reflection may be a
consequence of facing mortality.... To begin to understand
any great literature is to understand that it’s a race against
death, and it’s the redeeming power of love or God or art or
whatever the artist is proposing that’s the thing that makes the
race against death worth racing.... In a way, reflection is ask-
ing the questions that provoke self-awareness.”
Nothing is truly yours until you understand it—not even
yourself. Our feelings are raw, unadulterated truth, but until
we understand why we are happy or angry or anxious, the truth
is useless to us. For example, every one of us has been yelled at
by a superior and bitten our tongues, afraid to yell back. Later,
we yell at a friend who has done nothing. Such displaced emo-
tions punctuate our lives, and diminish them. This is not to
suggest that yelling back at a superior is a useful response. Un-
derstanding is the answer. When you understand, then you
know what to do.
The importance of reflecting on experience, the idea that re-
flecting leads to understanding, came up again and again in my
conversations with leaders. Now executive director of the Na-
tional School Boards Association, Anne Bryant was executive
director of the American Association of University Women
when she told me she has made reflection a part of her daily
routine: “Every morning after the alarm goes off, I lie in bed
for about fifteen minutes, going over what I want to get out of
Knowing Yourself