01/30/2022
We aren’t born knowing everything - thank goodness, our lives are richer for it. There may be things that you knew in your twenties that others take longer to grasp, or things that others learned implicitly early in life, that come to you like an epiphany much later. And on it goes. It can be helpful sometimes to ask yourself, “what would my 80-year-old self say?”
We learn by some combination of intention and serendipity. It can be scaffolded, but it can’t really be rushed. Has it ever happened in your life that you have had what felt like an epiphany only to realize moments later that you had heard it countless times before, maybe, “one day at a time.” That one took me a lot of meditation...
It is easy to beat ourselves up for not having understood something sooner. But that is the journey. With time we may see that earlier version of ourselves with compassion. With distance we also might recognize more of the context. And it is often the things that we learned the hard way that we are most able to help others with along their own path.
