Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Ciardi

Ciardi turns the usual pep talk inside out: everyone loves a person who stands tall for what they believe, but that kind of courage is socially rewarded, even marketable. “Convictions” come with a ready-made script. You can rally people, pick a side, sound decisive at dinner. Praising that bravery is “easy enough” because it flatters the audience’s appetite for certainty.

Then he lunges at a different target: the “sad young” of a “mealy generation,” phrasing that deliberately mixes pity with contempt. “Mealy” isn’t just weak; it’s bland, over-processed, pre-chewed. The insult implies a culture that prefers safe opinions and prepackaged identities, where being unsure reads as failure rather than honest perception. Ciardi isn’t romanticizing confusion as fashionable angst. He’s arguing that confusion is the more accurate emotional register for anyone living awake in a complicated world, and that the real deficit is not uncertainty but nerve.

The rhetorical trick is the swap: courage is typically linked to firmness; Ciardi stitches it to doubt. “Courage of their confusions” asks for stamina in the in-between, the capacity to admit you don’t know, to keep looking without grabbing the nearest ideology for relief. As a dramatist, he’s defending ambiguity as a moral discipline: the kind of character who can live without a tidy arc, withstand peer pressure, and resist turning every question into a tribe. In an era that rewards hot takes, the line reads less like scolding and more like a dare.