Looking beyond age to the milestones of maturity

You need to grow up! All of us at some time have heard it, said it, or thought it. But what is this state we call grown up?

There are many ways to define it. The ability to wait, and to make a decision and stay with it.

Accepting reasonable delays without impatience. Completing tasks. Being courteous. Not bragging. Being dependable, keeping your word. Understanding self-pity is futile and childish.

The implication is that growing up is a goal we will reach and if we don't then we will forever be immature.

Another perspective is there may not be any such thing as wholly mature. What if it is a continuous development?

Author Michael Drury wrote an essay saying maturity is not about aging and it is not a destination. It is a road and there are signposts, like the moment you wake up after some staggering blow and think, “I'm going to live after all.”

It's a moment you find out something you have long believed isn't so.

And the one after that, when you have parted with the old conviction and find to your astonishment, you're still you. Or the moment you discover somebody can do your job as well as you can, and you go on doing it anyway.

Perhaps it is the moment you realize you are forever alone, but so is everybody else and so in some strange and wonderful way we are more together than ever.

Or the moment you know life is a perpetual becoming.

And a hundred thousand other moments in which you find out who you are.

What if maturity is more about what types of experiences you've had and what you learned from them, and less to do with how many birthdays you've celebrated?