When you meet the same situation twice, you haven’t met it once.

From Alfred’s journal

The hawk came through the yard again this morning, second time this month, and I did the same thing I did the first time: froze flat against the maple bark and waited. For years I thought that was experience doing its work, the old lesson coming back when it was needed. But the first hawk came out of the west in flat light and I never saw it until the sparrows went up. This one came low along the fence line and I saw it from a hundred feet off, and what I felt was not recognition, it was a new animal entirely. When you meet the same situation twice, you haven't met it once. Switch says a hawk is a hawk; he was under the woodpile both times and did not see either one.