Learning Things I Already Know

In my old age and wisdom, I've come to realize the following:

a) It's better to give than to receive.
b) Raising kids the most challenging and rewarding thing I'll ever do.
c) Lessons mean more when you learn them for yourself.
d) Money is not the most important thing in life.

What I want to talk about today is not these things themselves, but the true nature of this class of knowledge.

These things are examples of what I'd call "canned" statements. You don't have to wait very long in polite company before hearing one of these statements. Making one of these comments confers great honour and nobility upon the speaker.

The tricky thing about these statements is that they're well known and socially acceptable, and they also happen to be true. Furthermore, they would be non-obvious if they weren't cliches: this class of knowledge is the kind of thing that you have to pay to find out. It takes hard work and maturity to understand these things fundamentally.

When someone says something non-obvious and true, it's clear that they must have thought it through. If someone points out that an object near the earth's surface falls approximately 4.9m in the first second, they've either measured it themselves or integrated 9.8 twice from 0 to 1. But with cliche's you can't tell if you're just listening to a parrot or if someone has actually had a fundamental realization about life.

On the upside, though, whenever I do happen to learn one of these things "for real", I get this funny little "aha" moment when I realize that the thing I just learnt maps onto one of those well-known statements. It's something like "Oh, you dopey Mr. Superhero, you're heard that about 50,000 times and you only understand it NOW???".