Experience

You can spend years developing logic skills, exercising your noggin through mathematics, and studying history, reading literature, philosophy and so on. The teachers do a great job in inculcating you with the basic knowledge you need for day to day life. Parents raise us, imprinting us with their ideas for success and what it takes to make it in the world. But then there are those things that happen that you've not read about in any textbook. They don't follow the rules of logic, don't have a familiar ethos, or develop any pathos that is congruent to what you've been taught heretofore. But get ready, baby, cause yer about to learn something Plato didn't teach at the Academy, or Aristotle at the Lyceum, or Seneca at the Stoa. That's right. You're about to be hit with the big unkinown, a crisis you could never have imagined or dreamed of in yer wildest dreams. It starts out with an abrupt perturbation, continues on to a lack of all hope and all resources, and culminates in the most terrible and powerful thoughts, feelings, worries and illuminations you've never heard of. Much oscillation is involved in the mind, as it swings wildly back and forth from one extreme to another, where a happy medium is not to be found. And then comes utter failure. Complete devastation. Worse, isolation. And really, a death. But don't fret, my brother, or sister, this is where you find out just how powerful the human body is to withstand suffering, where you find out how resilient, though it is slow in coming, the mind is , finally, how elastic the emotions are, in that they have the power to eventually snap back to a normal mode and yer able to get back off yer hindquaters and start to live again.

It's all relative. You may not be the smartes puppy in the litter when it's all said and done, but you will have made much progress, and will be personally amazed at the wisdom gained, once ya make it to the other shore.

When ya look back, you'll personify the opposition and think of it as follows:

'You didn't pull no punches, but you sure didn't push the river.'