This morning the phrase “If I knew then what I know now….” popped into my head.   It was not about a specific incident but more wistful thinking prompted by a news article I was reading.

Knowing yourself

This mornings wistfulness primarily arose from what I think of myself now versus what I knew about myself forty years ago when I made some key choices about how I would spend my life.

Lest I give the wrong impression, I have no feeling I made the wrong decisions, nor do I have any regrets.  My life so far has been and continues to be fulfilling and satisfying.   I am fortunate in that I am very comfortable with the real events that have brought me to the point I am at (this is not a perception, for me this is – reality)

I often use these posts to share philosophical ideas and that is my purpose today.

Knowledge and Experience

If I knew then what I know now can most often be related to knowledge gained through experience.  There are numerous ways to gather knowledge; whether proactive, reactive or sedentary (you just gather it like a rolling stone does not gather moss) as you move through life knowledge is gathered.

Gathering Experience

My thoughts traveled more along the lines of how  gaining experience requires time.  That is to say, while every moment of your life is an experience, the compiling of valuable and worthwhile knowledge generally (although not always) takes years of gathering, storing and analyzing these moment by moment occurrences.

The conundrum for me is the time it takes to codify a valuable set of experiences to the point where they are useful in guiding your decisions is often too long and so too late.  The decision point has long past.

Why Wistful?

Unfortunately time travel is not a reality (at least that I know of) so there is no way to explore and test alternatives.  What if I had……?

And then I realized, I don’t care and really the point is irrelevant. The enlightenment I experienced at that moment was very heartening and probably proof that I should be more happy than wistful.

What I have experienced, the decisions I have made and where it has brought me are really satisfying (both positive and negative experiences I would not miss one of them).  And that feeling is really good.

And if I did not feel this way, I suddenly understood now be a point to make a change.  It’s never over, never final.