Untitled

The only worthwhile competition is life takes place with yourself. On one side is who you are, on the other is what you can be. It's not the kind of competition you can ever win, you can only understand that with effort, with diligence, you can gain ground.

While I'm pitching platitudes - The only truth about life is the truth you make. Consciously or subconsciously we define ourselves and to a lesser extent our reality. There is a real world, but our experience therein is subjective.

Finally...no real wisdom can be transferred. The difference between knowledge and wisdom is knowledge is not subjective - knowledge can be transferred, it is a set of useful facts. Wisdom is the basis for one's decisions, one's actions in life, one's personal philosophy. We can only come to these through experience, through life and the act of living. Wisdom put into words comes out plain, lifeless, dull - trite or nonsensical.

With knowledge, we can be shown new things and come to know them. With wisdom, others can only put into words what we already know, and we can agree or disagree, but never learn. The words we find most wise are merely the words that express a personal belief - personal wisdom - eloquently or cleverly.



EDIT: This post has a conflict with a previous post, "Knowledge vs. Wisdom". I attribute this conflict to the limitations of knowledge and not an actual fundamental change in belief. The wisdom in the previous post was in reference mostly to a kind of "knowledge-enabler", or knowledge foundation. Today, I probably wouldn't use the word wisdom to refer to what I had called wisdom in that post.