Why Didn’t I See It the First Time?

Have you ever encountered something twice?

The same book. The same idea. The same place. Perhaps even the same person.

The first time, almost nothing happened.

Years later, you encountered it again and thought:

How did I miss this? Maybe you didn't.

Maybe the more interesting question isn't why the thing arrived when it did. It's what had changed in you by the time you encountered it again.

We don't receive information in a vacuum

We sometimes talk as though information simply enters us.

We read the book and learn the thing. We hear the advice and understand it. We visit the place and know whether it matters, but whatever we encounter meets a person who already has a history, priorities, assumptions, questions and concerns. Those determine, at least partly, what we're able to recognize.

At twenty-five, a sentence in a book may seem unremarkable. At fifty-five, after thirty more years of living, the same sentence can stop you cold. The words haven't changed. The reader has.

“I wasn't ready” can mean many things

I'm cautious about saying that things arrive “when we're ready.” It can make life sound more orderly than it is. Sometimes opportunities arrive at terrible times. Sometimes we're perfectly ready and nothing arrives. Sometimes we recognize something important and circumstances make it impossible to pursue. And sometimes we simply miss things.

But there is another experience worth distinguishing from all of those. We encounter something before we have a question for it. The information is there, but we don't yet have anywhere to put it. Later, something changes.

We have an experience. A relationship ends. We move. We begin work we never expected to do. We grow dissatisfied with an answer that used to satisfy us. Suddenly the old idea has somewhere to land.

Recognition depends partly on context

Think about advice you've received more than once. Perhaps someone told you something years ago that irritated you, puzzled you or seemed completely irrelevant. Then, much later, you found yourself saying almost exactly the same thing.

It's tempting to conclude: I should have listened the first time.

Maybe, but perhaps you couldn't make use of the information then in the way you can now. Understanding isn't simply a matter of exposure. Context matters. Experience matters. The questions we're carrying matter.

Sometimes we need information. Sometimes we already possess the information and need an experience that changes our relationship to it.

This changes how I think about regret

There is a particularly painful version of hindsight that says: If only I'd known then what I know now.

Of course.

But what you know now was shaped partly by what happened between then and now. We judge our earlier decisions using information—and sometimes an entire way of understanding ourselves—that wasn't available to the person making them. That doesn't mean every past decision was the best one. It doesn't erase consequences. But it does make “I should have known” a more complicated claim.

Could you actually have known what you know now? Or could you have possessed the facts without yet understanding their significance? Those are not the same thing.

And what about being “behind”?

We carry remarkably specific ideas about when things should happen.

Career established by this age. Relationship by that one. Financial security. Home ownership. Retirement. Creative accomplishment.

The list changes across cultures and generations, but the timeline remains remarkably powerful. Fall outside it and we can experience our lives as delayed. But delayed relative to what?

There are real deadlines in life. Biology exists. Money matters. Opportunities close. Pretending otherwise isn't liberating; it's dishonest. But many of the timelines against which we measure ourselves are inherited rather than inevitable.

Sometimes “late” means later than I expected. Sometimes it means later than other people. Sometimes it means later than the version of myself at thirty imagined.

Those are worth separating.

Looking backward without inventing destiny

Looking backward, our lives often appear more patterned than they felt while we were living them. One conversation led to another. Something we learned in one career became unexpectedly useful in the next. A place we barely noticed became important years later. An idea returned and finally made sense. I don't think we need to conclude that these things were arranged for us. Hindsight is doing some of the pattern-making.

But that doesn't make the pattern meaningless. It tells us something about how we have connected the events of our lives and how our understanding has changed. Perhaps the interesting thing about timing isn't that life knows when we're ready.

Perhaps it's that we are not the same person each time life presents us with a question.