12/14/2025
Why Don’t I Know This Yet?
(Lather, rinse, repeat.)
Sometimes I hold this idea that once I’ve learned something in life, I’m supposed to move on, graduate. 🎓
Maybe it did come from childhood. We memorized our times tables and our ABCs and were told, “Good, you know this now.” It created a quiet expectation that knowledge should lock in permanently, that once a lesson arrives, it stays.
In school, we organized knowledge like a staircase. You climb a step, you move on, and you never return.
Yet life has never worked that way. Life isn’t linear, and learning isn’t either. Real life moves in curves and loops and spirals, bringing us back to truths we thought we had already locked in.
When I was younger, I played with a spirograph—the little gears and rings where you’d place your pencil in a tiny opening and trace spirals that overlapped in perfect, imperfect harmony. The lines circled back on themselves in ways that felt familiar and new at the same time. I think about that now. Curved orbits within orbits. Paths we pass through again, but from a different angle, a softer touch, a deeper color.
Life is built on returning, it's built on cycles that fold back on themselves, not as mistakes and not as do-overs, but as the way we deepen.
Sometimes we meet the same brick wall again. Sometimes the grooves feel achingly familiar. Sometimes our forehead rests against it and the question rises almost automatically: "Why don’t I know this yet?" And the honest answer is simple: "You do know it. You’re just knowing it again—in a truer way."
Today I re-shared a message about peace—something I wrote months ago that rose up again this morning, undoubtedly at the exact moment I needed it. I almost hesitated, thinking, "You’ve already said this. Leave it." And then I realized, of course it resurfaced. That’s what truth does. It circles back.
Maybe we could allow ourselves to remember living is learning and wisdom is cumulative and
a return isn’t failure at all, but instead part of life’s natural rhythm.
And maybe “lather, rinse, repeat” wasn’t just a shampoo-bottle instruction. Maybe it's an oracle message hiding in plain sight. 🤔 🤣
There’s no harm in humor or in repeating. Repeating is how we deepen. And the beauty, always, is in the return to ourselves. 💜
(And maybe this whole thing is just me making an important note about nothing important at all — which might be the truest reminder that life really does move in circles.)
~ Elaine