Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.”
The first part of the quote is well known (and attributed on internet to various other people). What I find interesting is how the second part of the quote complements the first.
What he says is basically that experience comes from living through a number of lessons, and that can’t be fully understood theoretically by for example reading other people’s experience. The interesting part is how he describes that the key to life challenges is to be derived from one’s experiences, and that with experience we can overcome more and more complicated challenges and riddles.
As I become more experienced with things in life, I find more and more challenges and situations that need to be understood. I did not see them before. On one side I see how foolish I could be when I was younger, and and the other side I see how many the secrets of life remain before me, but that I have progressively the resources I need to tackle them. And that’s what makes life so interesting.
