Experience

The word comes from the Latin experiri, to try, and shares its root with periculum, danger. Where nothing was risked, nothing was learned. The Chinese 经验 says the same in two characters: one for passing through, one for putting to the test. Both ask you to go there yourself.

You cannot step into the same river twice. Systems are like that: the code, the traffic and the people are never quite the same ones tomorrow. So experience is never an answer to copy out. It is a kind of judgement — recognising a familiar current in water you have never seen.

We know more than we can tell. Most of what experience teaches settles into the hands: the log line that makes you stop, the graph that unsettles you before you can say why. The record below can give times and places. What it cannot tell is the part that matters.

So I hold my own experience with a little doubt. It saves me wrong turns, and it can also hide new roads. If you like, write and tell me about a river you have crossed — someone else's experience is a road I have not walked yet.