Xanga Featured Question: What is the greatest life lesson you’ve learned so far?

Many accuse me of lacking practical wisdom in the sense that I’m not fantastic at getting practical things done in this apparently existent world. I don’t always see the most efficient route to solving problems and on top of this am often accused of being too frank and honest and should sometimes temper my words. To the former I accept a regular display of ineptitude, but to the latter I think I cut through the emotional nonsense that often prevails and in those cases I do get things done more efficiently than others. I say what I mean and what I am thinking when it’s helpful. One thing I am trusting my family to have informed me correctly on is that I apparently over-exaggerate somewhat - I honestly don’t see myself doing it so I’ve taken to actually warning people this is thought of me after telling them something where I might have unintentionally done so. Otherwise the life’ lessons’ than I am accused of needing to learn I don’t think I have because I don’t see any particular need to. However of late I have realised a few things about myself which are useful in avoiding embarrassing mistakes.

First of all I’ve realised that I’m gullible. I take what people say on face value because I pride myself on the fact that people can take what I say as being true since I don’t lie. I need to question more than I do: I need to check things that sound potentially exaggerated with others, I need to read other opinions rather than the limited scope I do. So many times I have been caught out by people’s tales, examples of which I’m not going to go into here, and this is really not constructive. So I am trying to stop myself from accepting viewpoints without double-checking them against other reliable sources. I need to do this for politics, philosophy and simply people’s experiences.

Secondly, it’s been pointed out to me by my Mother that I’m far more changeable with regard to interests and opinions than it may at first seem (and I accepted the latter view that I’m pretty firm). I’m not talking about open-mindedness here which I do believe I have these days. I’m told that I always appear self-assured and supremely confident when, for example, speaking at debating but actually I’m constantly moving around. It’s a bit difficult to quite get across what I mean here, so let me give an example. I seem to swing back and forth between my respect for academic disciplines. For example, I’ve been looking up great Macbeth quotes this week and have lamented my poor GCSE English teaching for putting me off words. Recently I’ve denounced Physics as clutching at empirical straws and my deputy head recently commented to my father outside of school that I’m far more of a philosopher than a mathematician. I’m inclined to agree with this: I seem to be sliding over to the humanities a lot more. But then I look back a year ago and it was the complete opposite; I had very little interest in subjects outside maths and science. So the lesson learnt here is that I need to be very careful making such broad attacks upon areas of school as I may well change my opinion later. My mother’s example was a swing of obsessions between computing, ringing, reading etc.

Thirdly, I’ve realised that I seem to have something of an inferiority complex. I hate the fact that I constantly try to find ways in my head to put myself above other people. I’m not the best! I recognise and accept that. But I still find myself trying to justify some kind of superiority on all sorts of grounds. What I’ve tried to tell myself is that I am open-minded and think things through and thus any other abilities are unimportant: as Dumbledore said, one’s choices and not one’s abilities define a person. But I really do struggle to get over this psychological situation and I need to avoid this. Even now for example I am considering the fact that the blog of a friend has so much better posts than mine. It comes down to jealousy at the end of the day and all I can do is force myself not to think in these ways. It just wastes time. I need to accept that actually most of the people around me at school are more intelligent and do have better arguments. Why can’t I? I don’t know. Silly biology.

Fourthly, recently I have been actually noticing the vast numbers of people actually on this planet. It is incredible to think how small and insignificant any one of us is. There are so many other people, so many other thoughts cycling around. So in tandem with the above I need to keep this in my head, I need to realise more readily that our petty debates are so small and minor. Our ideas are tiny in the grand scheme of this world, and miniscule on the scale of the scientific universe. I have a friend who is of the opinion that a feeling of insignificance and coldness, of being a human tossed and turned upon the waves of fate, which is the best way to describe it here, is in fact her sole goal in terms of finding any kind of meaning in life (sorry L, I’ve probably misrepretented you here). I don’t think I agree with this, but it makes a point about how small we all are. The Internet again shows the vast numbers involved: thousands of blogs created every day, thousands of more intelligent comments posted.

So the above is things that I have realised recently about myself and I would argue that these are the most important life lessons I have learnt so far. I think I’ll need to reanswer this question in a few years, but right now what is the greatest? The fact that I have learnt to be open-minded, I do believe, and that I *should* be at peace with myself for making what I believe to be the right choices.