Maturity

The child, the adolescent, the young adult, the middle-aged, and the old man ask the same question, “Who am I?”  Age does not quell the question; age does not answer the question.  Who am I at 13?  Who am I at 25?  Who am I at 50?  Who am I at 75?  At the age of 75,  I answer the question each morning I awake and find myself still kicking with great excitement,  “I am!”  Perhaps that response, “I am!”  is a sign of maturity, of becoming an adult, of growing up, or maybe it is just the fact that I have grown old and am grateful to be able to get out of my bed.  What is maturity?  Is it becoming an adult (whatever that is)?  Is it growing up (whatever that means)?  Or is maturity simply growing old (those growing old know what growing old  means)?

Those “who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval,” wrote C.S. Lewis, “instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.  To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptom.  Young things ought to want to grow.  But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found out doing so.  Now that I am fifty I read them openly.  When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”  

Then there is Maya Angelou’s words to her daughter, “I am convinced that most people do not grow up…We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up.  I think what we do is mostly grow old.  We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.”

I think Thomas Wolfe in You Can’t Go Home Again does a good job of defining maturity. “He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out—through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused.  Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it…Just by living, by making the thousand daily choices that his whole complex of heredity, environment, and conscious thought, and deep emotion had driven him to make, and by taking the consequences, he had learned…,” to live into maturity and to say to himself and to the world, “I am!”

Ummm!  Growing up?  Growing old?
Maturity?