I don’t really understand love yet… and probably none of us do, to its fullest extent. But we can live and learn.

It is obvious that small children understand less than older children, and these less than adults. But at some time in their life, many people stop growing in their understanding, or at least their growth slows down to a snail’s pace. This does not need to be so. It is possible to keep growing for as long as the brain remains healthy, possibly a little longer.

Let me first mention the difference between knowledge and understanding. It is true that we need to first know. We cannot understand simply out of thin air. We need to know the various things involved in what we try to understand.  But just knowing lists of facts is not enough. We also need to know how they relate to other things.

You may say that bare facts are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. If we have too few of them, we are unlikely to get any of them to fit together. But even if we have gathered a large heap of puzzle pieces, we still don’t have the picture until we put them together.

I used to play with jigsaw puzzles when I was small, and I recognize that feeling of excitement when the pieces began to come together, and a new piece suddenly made a bunch of them connect. It is a feeling I have met again later in life, in other situations.

This understanding or insight of how things fit together is wonderful and a great step toward wisdom, but it is not yet the real thing. We first have to test it in real life. It is possible to have insight in many things, but they do not become very useful until we have tested them. It is at this point that we flesh out our understanding. It goes from a two-dimensional picture to a three-dimensional sculpture, so to speak. This takes its time. But if we have got the picture right the first time, time and practice will bring the finished work into being.

You can say that if you build a house and the blueprint is completely wrong, there will be no house at all in the end, just a jumble of materials. So to have the right picture is important. But the picture is no place to stop.

I speak in comparison here, of course. I don’t mean that insight is literally an image. There are other ways to say this too. But I like this comparison, it goes a long way to make these words understandable. Knowledge, understanding, wisdom. You have to start in the correct corner.

We can learn details and we can learn the big picture. Both of these are necessary. We need a big overview, an idea of what the world is and how it fits together. But no matter how long we live, we can always find more pieces that show details inside the picture, and pieces that extend it at the edges. It is a puzzle that is not complete in a lifetime. But we can see many great things in our puzzle picture even so. And continuing to grow is so worth it! A lot of problems become much smaller when we understand their place.

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For instance, most of my fellow Norwegians have more money than I, and live in a slightly higher degree of luxury:  A bigger home, a car, usually a vacation home, or otherwise going on vacations far abroad. These things cost money, and so they worry a lot. If they lived within their means, they would have other worries, but they would not have the added worry of sinking into debt even though they work overtime. So they complain. Can I tell them that they will be less worried if they live a simpler life and buy less unnecessary things?  I suppose I could, but it would have no effect. This is not a knew piece of knowledge that I can add to their heap of puzzle pieces. They already have it, but they cannot see it.

It is like that with many things. There are things I don’t know yet, and there are things I know but have not put into the picture, and there are things I have seen but not yet shaped into life. The picture has not become flesh, so to speak. So I can continue to grow in wisdom for the rest of my life, or until the brain starts unraveling, whichever comes first.