I feel like empathy is one of the most important things a person can foster within themselves in the quest to become a better person. Everything else has its place, but in a world where interacting with others, making friends and having a safety net to support you when in need it can be crucial at the right time, being able to not only see things from another perspective but to understand that every experience that has happened to you up until this point in your life is yours and yours alone. Nobody has accrued the same life lessons, experiences and information as anybody else; and even if they have, it has come to them through a different lens of perception, so that they might not even draw the same lessons, insights or morals from such an event as you yourself might. to berate, insult, or demean one because they lack the knowledge and understanding that you have is to impede their progress in learning those same lessons. This is such a short-sighted, competitive view of things that puts you in a 'win-lose' mindset, where in reality, it is a 'win-win' situation if anything at all. There is no competition, however, and you're not working against each other. If people would work together, everybody would benefit.
Living in a house with three other people, two of which are younger than myself, can be really frustrating, but it's an interesting experience to see people who are in roughly the same spot, but haven't quite learned or experienced all the things that I have. Some asshole might use this as a reason to think that they're better than these individuals, but that's arrogance and pretentiousness and probably stems from that person's need to feel important or superior. To not work with somebody in discovering more about themselves is to work against them, and I don't understand why there seems to be so much hate in one another as to actively work towards halting another's progress through life when you have nothing to gain from doing so.
There was a Dan Carlin podcast that I had listened to a little while ago, from his show Hardcore History, which was toying with the idea that if Hard Times make Hard People, do Soft Times make Soft People? Do generations who've lived through things like the Great Depression or the Red Scare after WWII have a better threshold for bullshit than those who've grown up in easier, more prosperous times? Perhaps I haven't had it as good as I could've, but I most certainly haven't had it as bad as I might have, either. It seems to me that people who don't know what a 'tough life' is, who haven't had to endure serious struggles throughout their lives (be them financial, emotional or otherwise) are people who overreact on an almost consistent basis, who freak out over things that are hardly worth getting bent out of shape over, and who worry or stress out about things they cannot change or influence. To simply understand that life goes on appears to me the most beneficial outlook in any situation, because things can ALWAYS be worse, and to not be thankful that you're still living, breathing and thinking is to overlook all of the gains and positive factors that are present in your life. This passage sounds a bit like some preachery sermon or some bullshit, but I'm not religious at all, and don't feel you need to be to understand that a positive outlook on life is the best outlook to have.
I'm still far from grown up, and the whole idea of maturity has always been really confusing for me. I've always been told I'm very mature for my age, but maturity seems like such an obscure, hard thing to define or to understand. Does maturity mean having self-discipline and self-control? Because I have neither of those. Does it mean being wise and not doing stupid things spontaneously because YOLO... I do all of that too. I think being smart is helpful and super important, but I also want to have fun, enjoy my life, and do my best to live 'in the moment'. I like to think of maturity best as a Venn diagram, perhaps, where, in one bubble you have 'expectations' and the other is 'reality'. The conjoining of these two spheres would happen as one became more mature, experiencing all that life has to offer and having a better idea of what to expect from any given situation (though perhaps this has its faults, suggesting that maturity comes with a jaded, pessimistic view of life and what it has to offer). If you've ever seen the movie 500 Days of Summer, the scene where Summer invites him to her little rooftop party thing and the screen splits into two scenes where one shows what he 'wants' to happen as he gets there and the other one shows what actually happens is probably the best example of this that I've ever seen. Either way, I think being mature just means having a better idea of how people work, how things work, and how life actually is as opposed to how you want it to be.
Intelligence and wit are important, as are all other things, but they're never as important as I had once imagined. I grew up thinking that being smart was the single most important thing one could strive to attain. Nobody is 'born' smart, but some people are born with a greater drive to 'become' smart; to research things, to read books, to question others and search for an answer for themselves. I never seem to learn as much as I hope to, but I never feel like I'm 'not' learning things, and it deeply saddens me when people shrug off school and institutions of learning because their school experience was less than pleasant and thus they link the concept of 'learning' with this boring classroom filled with boring people, which only further shuns them away from any kind of academic pathway. This is, to an extent, true, I will admit, but it is primarily up to you to decide what you get out of the courses and paths that you take when in any academic institute. Besides that, learning isn't something you're only doing in the classroom, but everywhere, at all times throughout your life you are gaining experience and wisdom. There's a Cherokee saying that I am particularly drawn towards which reads "everything in life comes to you as a teacher. Pay attention. Learn quickly," which I think everybody should be aware of. Every day of your life, every thing you do, ever person you talk to, every mistake you make or task you embark on, is a learning experience that can either be seen as a 'waste of time,' "when am I ever going to do this shit again?" or a chance to learn something about how people think, how to interact with others, how the world works, and how life seems to be. I would like to think of learning as something interesting and fun, but maybe I'm just that fucked up.
This might be a little scatterbrained, but then again, I have no idea what I'm doing. This blog is purely to sharpen our abilities in writing and effectively turn us into persons of letters, so although I may not have a solid notion of where I'm going or what I'm doing now, the fact that I'm doing anything at all should be a sure sign of growth and learning. To make no mistakes is to make no progress, also.