I'm hardly any sort of wise (except wise ass, I think I got that covered), I just watch a lot and, as Yogi Berra said: "You can observe a lot just by watching."
The hard part is training yourself to see what is actually there, and not what you want to be there, and to just watch and not judge or project values. And, to do that, you need to STFU and sit and let it be. We spend so much time on our own internal dialog, on our own interpretations, on projecting ourselves outward that we never really learn to sit and watch from a calm natural standpoint. We never really see what is there, settling instead for our own garbled Procrustean bed where we bend reality to suit us, not the other way round.
Or, perhaps (and it could be both) we lack experience that would inform what we see. For all the times when "I need some person in my life to love because that's the only way to true and lasting - like forever love - happiness" turns out to be true, and love lifts up and elevates (swell romantic string section here) us to be better people than we wold have been without it, for all that - there is still another side to love. The side that gave rise to the famous idea that "It's OK to love crazy until crazy loves you back." The kind of love where Chris Brown can beat up on Rihanna twice, 'cause the bitch didn't listen the first time - and because in that desperate love she went back after the first time to be there for the second go round. Until you actually see, up close and personal, how love can drain and debase people just as much as it can energize and elevate them its hard to see love in any sort of right relationship to the world and to person hood. Without the full view its all too easy to see love as some miracle be all and end all and miss it's real power and real danger.
Love is like fire. Sure, you can use it to cook a tasty meal. But you can also burn down the forest with it. And as anyone who has seen wildfires out in the Western US or in Australia, those fires don't just burn down the forest, they burn down the mountain, they burn down the world. Love can make you Rihanna too.
Love is a drug sang Roxy Music and that's not all that bad a comparison (aside from being true, as any combination of college level chemistry and biology will tell you). They can both be used and or abused, and that's a pretty fine line out there in deep space and its way hard to tell when you've gone past it until you are long past it.
So you have to - just like with fire - love carefully.
We all have to make scary decisions and wonder if it was the right one. But choosing not to do anything, to take no important steps, to not take a journey through what your life has to offer, results in a life unlived
That's pretty much the classic formula for your classic Greek Tragedy. You can write any paper on any Greek Tragedy based on this: You're dammed if you do, your damned if you don't. To the Greeks, a lot of life was not a choice between good and evil - it was between sucks a lot and sucks even more. It sucks to be Hecuba. (Hell, I can tell you that it sucks to be living with someone as I did who was doing Hecuba professionally and thus living it every day for well over half a year, as an added treat - those who know the story are going to love this - she used her, (our) children in the play. It was all kinds of messed up.) It sucks to be Agamemnon. Its not all that hot to be his daughter Iphigenia either, and by the way it also sucks to be Clytaemnestra, but in a different way.
So, if both choices suck, if you are damned if you do, and damned if you don't, then what is it to be human? Well, to the Greeks (and this is why the early Christians hated this stuff and burned every copy they ever came across) the nature of humanity could only be achieved by action, and in acting you can at least defy the gods and be human.
As all the fans of The 300 know them pesky Spartans were pretty much in the same boat (they were Greek after all). There was no way they were going to avoid that war. Either way, they were going to lose. If they blocked the Hot Gates they could buy time, but they would be slaughtered, if they let Xerxes roll on into Greece it would be horrific - because horrific was pretty much the way Xerxes rolled period. So...
So, we love this story so much that almost every culture has one. In the US its the Alamo. Where a bunch of people face down overwhelming odds and certain death with hell bound for leather attitude of '->-bleeped-<- 'em, we ain't going down without a fight." We really like that kind of proud, stubborn and relentless dumb fight it out deal. It's very human. That's when the Greek Tragedies turn, when the person choose not to wait for fate (the gods) but to go out and meet them head on. Sure, you're going to lose. Hell, you were going to lose all along, so you might as well have it go down on your terms. Man becomes man, man becomes human - not in submitting to the will of the gods, but in defying them.
