Experience is usually treated as something you gain over time. The longer you practice, the more experienced you become. Grades increase, responsibilities grow, and eventually you may be regarded as a senior practitioner.
But I don’t think that time alone tells us very much. There is a difference between spending many years doing something and allowing those years to change the way we understand it. We can repeat the same methods and explanations for decades, becoming extremely proficient, but proficiency and understanding are not always the same thing.
Sometimes experience confirms what we were taught. It continues to make sense because we have tested it, examined it, and seen it work in the context for which it was intended. At other times, experience should make us less certain. We begin to notice contradictions we once overlooked, explanations that sounded complete when we were younger may no longer answer the questions we now have, and things that once seemed obvious can begin to look very different after years of practice.
I think that is a healthy part of experience.
Experience does not always give us more answers. Sometimes it should give us better questions.
But that only happens if we remain willing to ask them. There is a difference between practicing for forty or fifty years and examining what we have practiced for forty or fifty years. The first gives us familiarity, the second may give us understanding.
Perhaps this is where seniority can become complicated. The longer we have trained in something, the harder it can sometimes be to question it. An explanation may have been part of our karate for decades. Practiced it, taught it, demonstrated it, and perhaps defended it when others questioned it too. Reconsidering that explanation can feel like reconsidering part of ourselves.
But experience should not only make us more certain of what we know. It should also make us more comfortable admitting what we may not know it all, allowing us to recognize when something no longer makes sense in quite the same way it did, and give us the confidence to look at it again.
That does not mean rejecting everything we were taught. Quite the opposite. If an idea survives serious examination, then our understanding of it becomes stronger. If it doesn’t, perhaps experience has done exactly what it should have done. It has changed the way we see things.
I sometimes wonder whether we place too much importance on the number of years someone has practiced and not enough on what those years have produced. Forty years of experience can represent decades of curiosity, experimentation, failure, adjustment, and reconsideration. It can also represent forty years of repeating the same thing.
The number alone really doesn’t tell us anything.
Perhaps the real value of experience is not simply that we know more than we once did, but that we become more willing to question what we think we know. There should surely be a difference between the way we understand something after five years and the way we understand it after fifty.
After more than fifty years in karate, there are certainly things I understand more clearly than I once did. But I also still have questions, questions about things I once accepted without giving them very much thought.
I don’t see that as a weakness in my understanding.
I think it may be one of the things experience was supposed to give me.