Thursday, October 25, 2018
Depth of experience
Just because you’ve journeyed once to a particular destination, doesn’t mean you fully know and understand it. Go there again, and again, and you develop an ever deeper knowing and connection to the place.
Just because you’ve been through something once, doesn’t make you an expert on it. Depth of experience, built through repetition, can be just as important as breadth of experience.
If you require a surgical procedure, you prefer a surgeon who has done that same procedure thousands of times. You prefer a pilot who has logged thousands of hours flying the same kind of aircraft you’re on.
The second time you read a good book, you’ll gain new insights you never considered during the first reading. Sometimes the best new activity is an old activity, experienced at a deeper, more mature, informed, and thoughtful level.
The experience of living is more than just a superficial checklist to be completed. It is a wondrous territory to be explored, widely and deeply.
Don’t be so eager to see it all, know it all, do it all, that you rush from one thing to the next, failing to find meaning in any of it. Instead, give love, commitment, nourishment, and depth to each experience, and rise to ever-higher levels of richness and fulfillment.
— Ralph Marston