This post wasn't prompted by anything that happened today. However, a conversation I had about something in particular got me thinking more generally about charitableness toward other people's learning paths.
You can't know something before you learn it. Of course. But, sometimes it's human nature to forget that other people aren't born prefabricated with the life wisdom of 60 year olds.
Example: Person A learns X through experience and incorporates X into his or her frame of reference for interacting with the world. Later, at a time when X is no longer in the forefront of A's consciousness and has become second nature, A encounters Person B, who has not learned X. Person A, forgetting his or her own prior ignorance, becomes exasperated. "Don't you know?" A might say, upon hearing which, B too might forget that people like A once didn't know X either, making B feel especially dumb.
Additionally, there may often be a gap of time between learning something and being able successfully to apply it. Sometimes, the gap might be quite long. Sometimes, the gap is unable to be closed, and a person is never able to apply in practice something they agree with in principle. This might be a particularly miserable situation for B, who knows X just as well as A does, but--for depression, for lack of emotional control, for reasons that may not be entirely clear even to B--isn't able to accomplish X, yet must sit through A's scolding, exasperation, or perhaps most frustratingly, the impugning of B's motives (which may be unfair, at least with regard to those not emerging from B's amygdala).
On a separate note, by "ignorance", in the most nonjudgmental sense of the word, I would include being completely possessed of a seductively plausible but ultimately wrong view, wrong idea, wrong system of thought, etc.
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Life is short, so let's have fun! Cheer up!
