I once watched two people leave a room carrying very different burdens.
One walked out with authority intact. The other walked out without a job.
Yet as time passes, I often wonder which of the two had actually lost more that day.
Age has a curious way of settling accounts. It teaches lessons that power cannot. Time humbles certainties that youth mistakes for permanence.
Every generation produces men who believe their title is their identity, their position their achievement and their authority their inheritance. For a while, the world appears to agree with them.
Then time intervenes.
The chair changes occupants. The office bears another name. The applause finds a different audience.
What remains is neither designation nor influence, but the memory of how one treated those who stood before them with less power than themselves.
Wisdom is not knowing how to command a room. Wisdom is knowing that one day you will leave it. The measure of a person is therefore not found in how high they rise, but in how they regard those who stand lower on the ladder. For ladders are temporary things; humanity is not.
Life eventually teaches every young man the same lesson: authority is borrowed, status is fleeting, and pride has an expiry date.
Dignity, however, is priceless—both the dignity we preserve in others and the dignity we preserve in ourselves.
In the end, time is the only hierarchy that outranks us all. And it is a patient teacher.