When it comes to people's actions sometimes we're not exactly sure of the motivation behind them. The nature/nurture battle, who do we blame? The parents? Or DNA? This is a difficult question, but I think that if we want to assign blame to anyone it should be the individual; Ultimately it is the individual who chooses to do what they do in the first place, they decide how they react when their parents tell them what to do, they decide whether to take a friend's advice. Sure, they had a troubled childhood, but plenty of people come out the other side stronger for it. A lot of them make it to the top regardless, and they do it by using their anger to fuel work and dedication, not by lashing out at others.
Forgive me while I indulge in my own upbringing for a minute: I was brought up in a family that got up very early, I get up very early. This could be either nature or nurture. I was brought up with a family where one parent is tidy and the other is messy; when I was younger I was messy, just like my dad, and now I am tidy like my mum. I find myself fighting with the urge to leave things untidy all the time. At times I can't be bothered to do anything. I buck authority, like my dad, but know it need to respect it, like my mum. I am patient, like my mum, but if you make me angry, I get very aggressive, like my dad. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that it's difficult to separate nature and nurture from each other and define what causes what. These things could be programmed in, or they could be things I've learnt.
Recently I've been wondering how I'd define wisdom. I certainly wouldn't define it as knowledgeable, I think that's a common mistake. Some people think they're wise just because they know a lot of stuff. You know about philosophy and religion and science and that's all well and good; wisdom is about the present though, and looking into the past, with philosophy for instance, isn't going to help you with that. I personally believe that wisdom can never be obtained because it's always evolving into something new. However, I also think that a big part of wisdom is recognising when you're wrong and being able to admit it. Major developments in this are also about looking at yourself objectively, which is obviously difficult to do in most circumstances. Part of wisdom and moving past the nature/nurture thing, is probably seeing what you can change and
changing it. The point here is the action - the saying "actions speak louder than words" remains true in this case.
On the reverse of wisdom is, of course, pigheadedness. I know I fall prey to it from time to time; I know that everyone does. However, pigheadedness (to me) seems to be born out of cowardice, it seems simply to be fear of being discovered as fake and/or wrong dressed up as arrogance. Those who suffer a lot from pigheadedness seem to be full of long words and sentences, flourishing with intellectual words and phrases that, if you unpick them (and a lot of people don't), mean absolutely nothing. In short, you ask a simple question with a possible one word answer and get back a paragraph about nothing in particular except a load of bullshit about how life is full of fateful moments and how we should live life by that. Don't be fooled, no matter how hard you look into it, there isn't an answer.
The more I study people, the more I respect those people who admit they're wrong, say sorry (if they need to) and move on with life. Because life is too short for regret (wow that sound cliché), grudges and pigheadedness.
So to those who are pigheaded I ask: Why are you scared to let anyone near you? Is it rejection? Because you're more likely to get rejected as you are, and it will probably hurt just as much. You fool people now, but trust me, in a couple of years they will have grown up, and when you come back they'll see right through you.
