“One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
One moment, of the Well of Life to taste–”
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

It was one of those thoughts that flash through the mind in a millisecond. The kind that leaves behind a flood of understanding so complete that you instantly know the whole story… and just as instantly lose your hold on it at the thought passes, as insubstantial as a rainbow. You are left with no more than the conviction that you have realised and understood an important concept… and you couldn’t put it into words to save your life.

I had been leafing through a book I haven’t read in years and was thinking about it on the drive to work. Nothing special, just an old favourite that held a phrase I wanted to put in context. Skimming through the text, I was aware that in the years since I had read it first, I had learned a good deal more about the subject. That accumulated knowledge, now brought to bear upon the page, changed my own understanding of what I was reading. I suppose that’s what started me thinking.

I had understood the book perfectly well when I had first read it. It had sent my thoughts off into several directions and made a huge impact on me at the time. Yet, I now realised that I had only understood it to the limit of my knowledge. When you think about it, that is as far as we can ever go. It was only in revisiting the book later with greater knowledge that it could open the doors to further understanding. Obvious really, so obvious that you probably never think about it.

You can see it in action all the time. We are constantly doing things we have done before and with practice, we learn more and we get better at them. We know this and simply don’t question it. What we don’t seem to bear in mind is that the same thing applies to more abstract skills, like thinking and understanding. We get better at that too. The mind ties itself in fewer knots and even learns to unravel them. The more off-the-wall the thoughts, the more possibilities we can see opening up for us as we bring everything we have learned so far to what we are doing.

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