Set goals. Look ahead. Focus on what you can do now. Where do you want to be in six months. The whole vocabulary of illness is built out of progress, and looking backwards is treated as a symptom rather than a sensible use of an afternoon.

There is a West African word that disagrees, and it has been disagreeing for several hundred years.

In Akan, spoken across much of Ghana, the word is sankofa, built from three pieces meaning return, go, and fetch. Go back and get it.

It belongs to the adinkra symbols, each carrying its own proverb. Sankofa is drawn as a bird with its feet facing forward and its head turned right round, lifting an egg from its own back. The proverb runs: it is not wrong to go back for what you have forgotten.

Our culture says the opposite. We have dwelling, which is a criticism, and living in the past, which is a diagnosis. We have no respectable word for deliberately retrieving something you put down.

And you have put a great deal down, mostly without deciding to. Things fell off the cart in a bad year and were never picked up, and the absence stopped being noticeable. The choir. The garden. Sunday cooking. The friend you stopped ringing because the calls had become updates.

Here is the distinction that makes it usable. Dwelling is circular and brings nothing back. You go round the same year, the same appointment, the same sentence somebody said, and arrive where you started with less. Fetching is specific. You go back for one named thing and return carrying it.

Look at the bird again. It is not flying backwards. Its feet point forward, and it takes one egg.

That is the limit worth being honest about. Some of what you put down is not retrievable, and no proverb changes it. The standing, the stamina, the version of you who booked things four months out. We sat with that loss a fortnight ago. But not everything belongs there. A great deal of it is unattended, fetchable in a smaller form than you left it.

The smaller form is the trick. Not the choir, singing in the kitchen. Not the allotment, one pot by the back door. Not Sunday lunch for nine, one thing you like cooking, for yourself.

Which makes this week’s question a retrieval, not a plan:

Today’s Practice

An inventory, then one small fetch. Half an hour with paper, and the fetching itself can wait until the weekend.

On a hard day, write the three and stop there. And if going back takes you into looping rather than retrieving, round and round what was lost with nothing coming back, that is a different process and a therapist is better equipped for it than a newsletter.

What the Research Says

Psychology has a name for the useful version of this, and a reasonable evidence base behind it. Behavioural activation works by deliberately reintroducing activities a person valued before they withdrew, chosen for meaning rather than anticipated enjoyment. It is one of the better supported treatments for depression, holds up against more complex therapies, and is cheap to deliver. Most of the research is in depression rather than chronic illness, and nobody has shown it changes a disease. But the underlying finding is solid. Doing the thing tends to come before wanting to do it, rather than after.

Everyone’s Talking About

Future self work is the fashion pointing the other way. Letters to yourself in five years, visualisation of who you are becoming, the journal of prompts about the person you want to be. Some of it helps. The complication is that research on positive fantasy repeatedly finds that vividly imagining a good outcome can reduce the effort people put in, because the imagining delivers some satisfaction in advance. What works better is pairing the wish with the obstacle. And the genre suits a body that cannot forecast next Tuesday poorly. Fetching one named thing may be the more honest exercise.

Come Home

Five lines, and none of them are about moving on.

One act for today, if you want one. Write down three things you stopped doing and miss, and circle the one that would cost you least to attempt.

The bird has its feet facing forward the whole time. Nobody said you have to leave it all back there.

P.S. Tomorrow, one finding. What the brain appears to do at night that it cannot do while you are awake, and how much of that is settled.