I debated in various forms for the entire 4 years of my college life, and as I’ve grown with time and experience, I genuinely believe we’ve got the concept of debating completely wrong in the education system.
The intent of all debates in schools/colleges currently is to ‘win’ the debate and convince the other person, that your opinion is the correct one, and must be agreed upon – no matter what it takes.
While the intent of any debate/discussion should not just be to speak, but to listen, learn from the other person and on occasions, even change your opinion, completely different from what you had when you started.
This flawed concept of debating is one of the major reasons why we have mediocre political debates with friends and family, brainstorming discussions at work where all of us have been trained to have such little egos, and do whatever it takes to be right, ‘win’ the discussion.
The definition of good debaters needs to seriously change from good orators with good convincing skills to people who who don’t just speak, research well, but also listen, empathise and respect reason.
What’s the hardest thing to do in life?
Moving on, that’s the hardest thing to do in life. And no ladies and gentlemen, it doesn’t just have to do with moving on with from your exes. There’s much more.
Back in college, I was very passionate about theaters. Post college hours, I would invest all my time and energy in building that character that I had to play on stage, in getting that line, that emotion right. So much so that the character would become a part of me, and that would reflect on stage too. But once I was done performing the play and had received my share of appreciation/criticism, the hardest thing for me was to move on to the next play, the next character I had to portray on stage. The hardest thing for me was to kill that part of me that I’d worked on, built over weeks, months and move on to the next one.
And gradually over time, I realized that this was something that each one of us felt was terribly hard for each one of us to do. Moving on from the school/college friends who gave us the best time of our lives to our workplaces, moving on from the jobs that you worked so hard to get into because you don’t like it anymore, moving on from being complacent about that successful venture you built, that song you wrote, that act you did that everyone is talking about to the next one, from that failure has bogged you down and broken you into pieces to the next face of your life and of course, moving on from your exes. You know the last one pretty well, I’m sure.
And I use this lesson that I’d learnt from my experience in theaters, that like every good or bad act comes to an end, every high or low in life does too. And no matter how much our heart wants to stay with the part of us that we are presently, it is important for us to move on.