As I was contemplating on a
number of occasions where I have gotten myself in heated arguments with some
people and mostly those who say they are older than I am and claim to be the
wise and best at almost everything, a number of deductions and questions came
into my mind.
Do all the grownups help young ones to develop their full positive mental and cognitive prowess? Do the old people ever realize that they ever kill the potentials of young people? Do all these people irrespective of whether they are old or young who claim to be at a better position to help others really not exploit them? And do they actually help them?
A friend of mine who I have known for close to four years now actually made me lose the respect that I had for long
I was a frequent visitor of his
blog hoping that he always had good information o pass on the public, but I as
put in use my detective and investigative instincts, I realized that most of
the information on his blog is plagiarized. On that note, no longer visit his
blog since I have come to a conclusion that he just a mere representation of
people’s minds and ideas in his name. That
makes one no worse than an academic murderer. The question I will add on to
this is, how will such a person be of influence to people he claims to be
leading, when in actual sense the ideas he puts down are not a representation of
his actually thoughts and how will I be tempted to believe in such a person
if all he
does is unscrupulous? I would have said more and more, but for
now, will end at that.The question of older people being able to mentor the young ones who live around or with them... reminiscing the time when I took part in a writing contest organized by the centre for African cultural excellence (CACE), a few things again stuck to my mind and left me pondering if really we can mentor young people if we make rather harsh and biased remarks on what they do and or what they intend to do. After my short story, “I will fight on” was short listed, we went through a mentoring session that culminated into each of the 23 writers attached to mentors, people with accredited attributes in writing in and around the world. I was attached to one of the writers who for long I had been hearing about and was still reading her story the Butterfly dreams. She asked for my story which I did email to her and whereas I knew that my story had many mistakes, the most catching comments from her were, “do you really read fiction. It looks like you read a lot of self help books” this in its own style was biased. That first gave me the impression that however much I tried to push on, my life thought, “where there is always prejudice and preconceived bias, however much you try to be good, you will always be bad” comes into play. Eventually, I ended up giving up and was kicked out of the shortlist that made it to the final publication. If at all my mentor will read this, let her not take this personal, but there is a point I am driving at.
A few months later after I changed the title of my eBook enrolled at #Amazon.com from “marry or keep searching” to “#the secret of loving and being loved”, a face book friend of mine Phionah B, who I may have personally met or not at all read it and had a chat with me on face book and her comments were as follows
“Your book is interesting though
I don't know why you chose to use the commanding tone (as used by some
preachers) and she went on “it prevents
some of us who have an attitude towards that commanding language from gaining
interest. There is away it blocks ones ego to take in the message yet it would
have been attractive and helpful otherwise” when u look at their style, t is not harsh but conveys the message.......
(I don't know if I am making sense) there are things that are facts and we know
them because we encounter them each day, but for us to take them seriously, the
way they are presented matters. Yours is not a science book meant for
examination work or a constitution to go by I guess”. And later she sends a message and says, whereas the comments were rather touching this final comment would give an array of hope“Your book is helpful especially to the
single women”
If there is anyone reading this
article, I ask, who among these two; my mentor and the reader, who would be a
better mentor than the other? Is it the one with rude comments or the one with
soft and encouraging comments? This is where the negative significance of the “wise” comes in. they live with
us, they interact with us and they are everywhere, but has their existence been
of any relevance to the people around them? How many people have they made
great apart from self revere?
Is mentoring just looking at only the negative side or the positives as well? does one just mentor by criticizing without giving solutions? these among many other things is what most of our so called elderly and grown up people do, that is why you find that in the long run, their efforts are admonished and yet they at the same time use their ideas to foster their social economic growth and development. Great thinkers in the world among others: Sigmund Freud, Ivan Pavlov and William Shakespeare among others are believed to have written their first pieces of works in their early twenties that have remained relevant to the modern world. Chinua Achebe, one of the most valued writers wrote his first novel, things fall apart when he was just 24 years and yet today there are people who believe that young people are incapable.
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