Principles and life lessons versus prejudices
Long time no see.
After a while, I am here with another weird musing of mine which is related to an incident that happened long ago. So I was the member of an academic club or something of that sort in my college. External mentors used to come every weekend and give sessions on career management, skill search and on other topics like those. I remember, one person that came on such a weekend for the program. He was sharing some general advices for making one eligible to build their career and also some on how ones behaviour should be and all. In between, he will ask the students some questions so that we can share our opinion, as these were interactive sessions. When he put forward a general topic like that(I do not recall what topic was that) and asked about my take on that, I obviously answered based on my knowledge. I usually do not speak much on a topic that I am barely aware of or not have any experiences in. This time I spoke confidently because the topic was something that I had a strong opinion about. But the mentor actually was smiling in a sarcastic way and said that, “It is absolutely not like that. How can you be so sure about it? You are a girl with a lot of prejudices and preconceptions about things”. I was surprised to see him judge me like that and I told him that I talked in reference to the experiences that I had regarding the topic. His reply was that there is no way a twenty-one year old like me would have such experiences in her life to talk like that and I am so young that my opinion could only be a prejudice not a principle or a life lesson.
I am a person who respects my elders and I would never misbehave with them no matter how bad the situations are. I believe that these people are the ones capable of giving us insights about what can happen further in our lives and advices how to deal with them given their age and experiences they had. But it does not mean that only the elder people have that wisdom. The saying that, ‘Age is just a number’, can be used in many instances. Here, I am going to use it to emphasize the fact that even a ten year old kid who got the responsibilities to look after his family all on his own or some other difficulties that occurred to him suddenly, due to several circumstances will be more experienced than I am or than any other forty year old who had been living a much simpler life. You never know what lessons are taught to you at the most unaccounted times of your life. You might not be even at an age to understand any of that but will be forced to live with it or get through it, because no one should give up right? So whatever that kid does to comprehend that situation gives a lot of life lessons and in between he will keep some principles to follow every time which has given him nothing but a streak of light in his life. People who had such life incidents will not be showing prejudice instead would be sharing what they have learnt all along that life. There is a major difference.
People gain knowledge about everything as they get older which is a given fact. And learning to accept and acknowledge the younger people who might be speaking from their heart and knows very well what he/she is talking about, is also important. I also believe that these young people will also try to understand and listen to you if there are things that they are not sure of. It’s because they are always looking for some kind of guidance in their life and will not reject anything of that sort that comes to them. They will be only adamant in talking about things that have made major rules in their lives through experiences.
In this world filled with people of one or the other misery or absolute nothing, no one should be judging each other by saying they are not well aware of what life really is or there is more for them to learn before making any statements and so on. Each person has their own perspective of life and they might be trying to reach out to others and share that perspectives. God knows, at what point in the life of someone else that these perspective and thoughts might help them to revive themselves. So, let’s try and not neglect any insights because they are all coming from people like us.
