Resistance in a More Convincing Face

I’ve already encountered problems, knowing how to solve them, this knowledge has made me faster and smaller than the problem required,
I’ve arrived at new rooms with the complete furniture from previous rooms, arranging it identically, but missed the unique shape of the space itself,
I’ve arrived with my expertise, ready to use it like a key that fits a lock without even looking at it, only to accept I’m still learning,
When did I approach something I’m considered good at with the openness of someone new to it, without anything to prove wrong,
I’ve encountered problems knowing how to solve them, which has consistently prevented me from discovering the answer, the problem has always awaited someone willing to not-know to find…

I’ve let my experience limit my imagination, calling it discipline when it’s really just the slow narrowing of my beliefs about what’s possible within something I thought I fully understood,
I convinced myself that a particular way of doing something was the right way because it had worked before under specific conditions that no longer easily apply,
I’ve let the accumulated weight of past work in a field I care about act as both a foundation and a limit, building on it without testing if the limit was real or inherited,
What would I try right now if I could forget everything that came before me and decided wouldn’t work, but yet another approach to the learning process,
I’ve let my experience become my limitation, which has often felt like wisdom, making it hard to distinguish between real practice’s accumulated intelligence and the hardened assumption masquerading as “wisdom”…

I’ve been in rooms where someone without credentials, history, or established position made a groundbreaking move that changed the possibilities forever,
I’ve been in those rooms and felt a complex mix of admiration and something harder to name when the person who didn’t know the rules discovered the hidden boundaries beneath,
Experts adjusted and recalibrated in those rooms, some recovered gracefully, while others didn’t, still they had to decide if their mastery could survive a different kind of modern intelligence,
Am I the one who’s genuinely enlarged by the unexpected move, or the one who leaves shaken because my mastery depended on there being no moves left I hadn’t encountered at all,
I’ve been in rooms where an unlabeled thing did what a labeled thing couldn’t, and I’ve often felt lost after watching a permanent limit quietly dissolve from the label itself…

I learned the lesson from the story and carried it into every room, as if learning meant I no longer needed to keep learning,
I’ve learned the moral and missed the story, the story and missed the moral, and been certain each time that my interpretation was the most important through my final understanding,
I’ve learned from the past and organized the future around that learning, making it smaller than it could have been if I’d kept it as a question instead of a mere conclusion,
What’s the most crucial thing I’ve learned about my failures, that I’m afraid to question because it might undermine my confidence again and again, until I develop another form of pattern,
I’ve learned the lesson and let it become my new limit, calling it wisdom, but calling it wisdom is the last and most sophisticated layer of the same old resistance, wearing a different and more convincing face of curiosity…

Watchwords:
The arriving-already-knowing kept me from finding it,
Experience became the ceiling I mistook for wisdom,
The unlabeled thing did what the labeled could not,
The lesson became the next limit I carried in,
Resistance wearing a more convincing face this time...