Valuing Sagacity

These many years I have noticed how often journalists disparage Oprah.  From my vantage point of being of a similar age, with the same Meyers Briggs profile (INFJ), I have a clearer understanding of Oprah’s passion for “educating” people.  It’s an innate desire to help people and in Oprah’s case she has the ability to reach millions of people and there can be no doubt that she has had an amazing impact on many of these people.  I’m not deaf to how she may come across to people but I smile at her eagerness with understanding that she’s simply doing what she was born to do. 

       Ah, you may now be saying, I’m speaking out of the same manual as Oprah.  Well, perhaps I am but with rather less success.  One of my observations over the last few years is that the audience for the wisdom of age is really quite small.  In fact, it seems that only those who are also in the same age bracket are interested in learning what their peers have learned and are willing to share.  Was it ever so?  Most likely, since we all know that youth wants to learn from their own mistakes.  Dipping into Plato or Socrates we certainly find that while the youth may have sat around and listened to the old boys, they then went off to fight them some wars or poison their wives.

       There’s also a tendency as one gets older to hark back to the good old days, which is extremely boring.  That’s something wise ones ought to forego because if nothing else, it is futile.  Life ever moves forward and there is no going back.  True sagacity is learning to value those immutable truths that bring harmony, balance, peace and joy into one’s life.  Finding one’s true north on virtues, principles and morality is not simple because life is complex.  One must learn when to be flexible and when things will always, always be black and white.  Those items may be small in one person’s artillery, and larger in another’s.  Mine is not to judge or reason why.  We all value things differently.

       One firm thing in my bag of values “do harm to no one”.  It makes for an easy sleep.