The experiences we walk through—and the lessons we learn along the way—can help illuminate what we once thought we knew.
Personally, I can look back and see things I thought I once ‘knew,’ and realize I really only knew them in a superficial or theoretical sense. And now years later, with a broader base of experience, I have a much different perspective and deeper understanding of these same things.
Perhaps we read something, or heard something, and thought we understood it. But today, if we come across the same idea, we understand it in a totally different way. Not that our understanding was necessarily wrong in the past, just incomplete. And it was only through experience that we came to understand it more deeply.
Of course, first-hand experience isn’t the only teacher. But it does provide perspective that’s difficult to replicate.