What to Do With the Remains of Your Day?

We all know the feeling and most of us do it on a daily basis. The process of reflection at the end of the day is, more often than not, our minds' way of storing our experiences, feelings, emotions, and thoughts throughout the day. We contemplate our actions, reactions and idly wonder what we could have done differently, how these were perceived by our peers and how they affect our future interactions in similar situations. Basically, our social and empathic skills and also help us fine-tune our relations to other people, our emotions, and thus our personality. Reflection is how we evolve as human beings. Without reflection at the end of the day, we continue to tread the same waters, never realizing that these waters are merely a single drop in the ocean of life.

Steven Soderbergh and Cate Blanchett

Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954), British writer

English: Point to point course, near Kenton

This lack of reflection is a key theme throughout Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. The main character and narrator of the book, Mr. Stevens, is a prime example of the necessity of reflection. He has spent his entire life in the lower rank of the English class system, doing the bidding of others and does so by negating his own feelings and emotions to the point where he loses a part of his humanity as seen with the death of Miss Kenton's aunt (Ishiguro pp 185-188). It is not until after having exited her room after she has asked him to that Mr. Stevens realizes that he did not offer his condolences. Immediately, he feels a pang of guilt, but represses the urge to re-enter and make amends. Instead, he vows to offer them later,