Knowing vs. Understanding

There's a version of knowing something that's basically just storage. You can retrieve the fact on demand. Ask me what year the Berlin Wall fell — I'll tell you. But for a long time, that date sat in my head like a pebble in a jar. It didn't connect to anything. It didn't change what I noticed or how I thought.

Then one day I was walking through a neighborhood and something clicked — this street existed before the wall, during the wall, after the wall. The same street, but the wall made it a border, then unmade it. Suddenly 1989 wasn't a number anymore. It was a rupture, a restoration, a thing that happened to real places.

That's understanding. Not more facts. A different relationship to the ones you already have.

The gap between the two is easy to paper over. You can answer the question correctly either way. Schools mostly test whether you can retrieve — which is why you can graduate knowing a lot and understanding surprisingly little. The knowledge is there; it just hasn't done anything yet.

What causes the shift? I don't think it's time, exactly. I think it's contact with the real thing. Reading about grief is knowing. Losing someone is understanding. There's a tactile quality to understanding that knowing lacks — like the difference between reading about swimming and getting in the water.

The strange part is you can't force it. You can create conditions — exposure, reflection, connecting things to things. But the click happens on its own schedule. Sometimes in the middle of a walk.