The Value of Experience

Kiran frequently comes up with questions for us that are thought-provoking and maddeningly difficult to answer on the spot. Questions like ‘what job would you do if you had to choose something new’ or ‘if you had to choose a country other than Canada to live in and you could never leave, what country would it be?’ We’re getting used to thinking on our toes.

Kiran asked us yesterday for one thing that we didn’t know about becoming a parent that we wish we had known beforehand. There wasn’t a good answer for this question. Everything that took us by surprise as new parents we already ‘knew’. We had read books, we had received advice, we studied the hell out of parenthood. Yet after Kiran was born, we still felt unprepared.

We were told that we would be tired. We knew that our life priorities would be changed. All the information we knew about parenthood was accurate, and for the most part it was complete. But we only began to really understand it when we experienced it for ourselves. If you asked us to describe parenthood now, it would be exactly how we would have answered the question pre-kids. The words we use may not change, but experience brings a new understanding of those words.

Imagine trying to describe melancholy to someone who had never experienced it before. You might say that it’s a mixture of happy and sad, or you might use the word ‘bittersweet’. One way or another you would try to describe the unknown emotion in terms that the listener would understand – existing emotions (happy, sad), taste (bitter, sweet). Now imagine that you had never felt melancholy and you had to imagine it using these descriptions. You could read all you want about melancholy; you could maybe even write intelligently about melancholy but until you experience the emotion you really don’t get it.

Experience is what our 4-month sabbatical is all about. We have chosen to deeply experience 4 different cities that have had a significant impact on Western society; our hope is that in so doing we will have a greater understanding of our society and our place within it. It sounds cliché but history does come alive when you are standing in the places where it happened.

This does not end just with a better understanding of the cultures of Vienna, Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. As we add experiences and begin to chart territory in our mind we expand our own boundaries. Adding ‘melancholy’ to one’s vocabulary of experiences adds another reference from which other more esoteric emotions can be measured. Likewise, as we expand our ‘vocabulary of understanding’ of Western culture I hope we will be better equipped to learn and understand other cultures, other histories, other people. As we immerse ourselves in German, Italian, Greek, and Arabic we give ourselves a framework for beginning to understand other languages and communication in general.

As each of these months turn over we will be interested to see what’s underneath – what was learned, what is better understood, and what new boundary markers we’ve placed in our own expanding territory.