Maturity is what gets the girls
movingfinger
Posts: 117
Maturity
“To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.”
--Edna St. Vincent Millay
Maturity is what gets the girls, at least that’s what I thought when I was in middle school. All the girls fawned over the older high school boys, with their quasi-maturity carried upon their sleeves. Back in those still dubiously innocent times maturity seemed like it was just another biological function that rode on the heels of puberty. Then puberty came and it passed, we were all still a bunch of idiots, now with acne. Maturity never just began to seep from my pores and my voice, once broken, was not honed by maturity’s aged stone. Over the years, though, I have become a seemingly mature individual, it was not a sudden change, and it is hard to pinpoint when the transition was made. It is easier now to look back across the teemed fields of adolescence and surmise what exactly maturity is and what catalyst brings it about.
I believe that maturity is gained as an individual slowly becomes disillusioned of their childhood’s padded education. When I was young I learned a lot of things that weren’t true, but were only placeholders for the real knowledge I was being prepared for. An example of this is the story of the stork who delivered babies around the world that I learned about when I was still knee high to a grasshopper. I must admit it seemed plausible enough then, even if it was an absurdity designed to tide over my curious mind. If my father had instead sat me down and drew a little map of the female reproductive system and the role that I would one day play in it, my reaction would not have been one of easy acceptance. Nonetheless, an individual’s early life is surely strewn with many of these false ideologies and it is as they become systematically eliminated that an individual slowly gains their maturity.
A quote comes to mind; “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things,” (Bible -- I Corinthians 13:11). I was raised in the Catholic Church, spent a majority of my Sundays soaking in the good word, waiting for the doughnuts handed out after the service to get the bitter taste of Christ out of my mouth. In CCD—a Catholic Hitler youth of sorts—we learned about how God created the world in seven days and all that other weirdly easy to swallow stuff. I was impressionable; I bought all of the religious propaganda as if, well, as if it was the word of God (if Bush was president back then I’d probably even buy his reasons for going to war). Just like my dad’s proposal of the stork, Adam and Eve were an easy answer to a complex problem. It is an appetizer for the mind of a child. The problem is, once these thoughts are imbedded they become hard to remove.
Often times a false ideology is removed in stages. First babies come from a stork, then from mommy and daddy kissing, then from mommy and daddy kissing lying down and then, then all hell breaks loose. This transition from fiction to fact is the maturing process. This transition is a slow process; elementary school does little to dispel earlier set notions. In elementary school I learned how to read, do math, list the names of the states and other such things. It is not the duty of the elementary school teacher to disillusion the children of their magical youthful notions—what some people call innocence—they must only provide the basic tools so that we may comprehend the truth when it emerges. Immanuel Kant once said something somewhat similar to this, except much more eloquent and cogent; “Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in the lack of understanding, but in the lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Have courage to use your own understanding!” Education allows us to understand the world without subjecting it to an easy, coughed up, make-believe answer; it is truly an enlightening and maturing experience.
There is no way to tell exactly when one becomes mature, because there are many varying degrees of maturity. New false ideologies are procured everyday (many much more subtle then a baby-bearing stork) and each time one is blindly believed it is a mark against ones maturity. Maturity in a sense is one’s ability to discern for themselves whether or not a belief is valid or not. Think of it like this: when you were a child it was easy to believe in Santa Claus, it makes perfect sense that big jolly white guy would load up a sled each year to deliver millions of presents in one night. Now it seems preposterous to think that one could ever believe such a harebrained scheme. That is because we are mature enough to realize for ourselves, based upon the knowledge that we’ve gained in life, that the notion of Santa Claus is not plausible.
One must not be mistaken, we do not gain maturity if an older sibling tells us that Santa Claus isn’t real, because we will not truly believe them until we’ve discovered it for ourselves, this is where the maturity is gained. The disillusionment attributed to the gaining of maturity is often a bittersweet feeling, though. The real world is a scary place and when confronted with it one thinks longingly back to the easy answers given by soft tongues. Instead of a shooting star being god winking at you, it is a small object burning in our atmosphere, a harbinger of the bigger and nastier asteroids out there just waiting to pelt earth.
O’ the world is a scary place, this is why we continue to tell our children the same sweet lies, because we look back at those lies with longing, wishing that they could ring true again. Innocence in a way becomes the antithesis of maturity. Once an individual becomes disillusioned, though, it becomes impossible to return to innocence, the cherry sunglasses vision of the world. Maturity hones our ears, makes us see past the bullshit pushed in front of us everyday. It gives us a discerning eye, it allows for us to survive without mommy and daddy there explaining things to us in a simple and magical way.
“To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.”
--Edna St. Vincent Millay
Maturity is what gets the girls, at least that’s what I thought when I was in middle school. All the girls fawned over the older high school boys, with their quasi-maturity carried upon their sleeves. Back in those still dubiously innocent times maturity seemed like it was just another biological function that rode on the heels of puberty. Then puberty came and it passed, we were all still a bunch of idiots, now with acne. Maturity never just began to seep from my pores and my voice, once broken, was not honed by maturity’s aged stone. Over the years, though, I have become a seemingly mature individual, it was not a sudden change, and it is hard to pinpoint when the transition was made. It is easier now to look back across the teemed fields of adolescence and surmise what exactly maturity is and what catalyst brings it about.
I believe that maturity is gained as an individual slowly becomes disillusioned of their childhood’s padded education. When I was young I learned a lot of things that weren’t true, but were only placeholders for the real knowledge I was being prepared for. An example of this is the story of the stork who delivered babies around the world that I learned about when I was still knee high to a grasshopper. I must admit it seemed plausible enough then, even if it was an absurdity designed to tide over my curious mind. If my father had instead sat me down and drew a little map of the female reproductive system and the role that I would one day play in it, my reaction would not have been one of easy acceptance. Nonetheless, an individual’s early life is surely strewn with many of these false ideologies and it is as they become systematically eliminated that an individual slowly gains their maturity.
A quote comes to mind; “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things,” (Bible -- I Corinthians 13:11). I was raised in the Catholic Church, spent a majority of my Sundays soaking in the good word, waiting for the doughnuts handed out after the service to get the bitter taste of Christ out of my mouth. In CCD—a Catholic Hitler youth of sorts—we learned about how God created the world in seven days and all that other weirdly easy to swallow stuff. I was impressionable; I bought all of the religious propaganda as if, well, as if it was the word of God (if Bush was president back then I’d probably even buy his reasons for going to war). Just like my dad’s proposal of the stork, Adam and Eve were an easy answer to a complex problem. It is an appetizer for the mind of a child. The problem is, once these thoughts are imbedded they become hard to remove.
Often times a false ideology is removed in stages. First babies come from a stork, then from mommy and daddy kissing, then from mommy and daddy kissing lying down and then, then all hell breaks loose. This transition from fiction to fact is the maturing process. This transition is a slow process; elementary school does little to dispel earlier set notions. In elementary school I learned how to read, do math, list the names of the states and other such things. It is not the duty of the elementary school teacher to disillusion the children of their magical youthful notions—what some people call innocence—they must only provide the basic tools so that we may comprehend the truth when it emerges. Immanuel Kant once said something somewhat similar to this, except much more eloquent and cogent; “Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in the lack of understanding, but in the lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Have courage to use your own understanding!” Education allows us to understand the world without subjecting it to an easy, coughed up, make-believe answer; it is truly an enlightening and maturing experience.
There is no way to tell exactly when one becomes mature, because there are many varying degrees of maturity. New false ideologies are procured everyday (many much more subtle then a baby-bearing stork) and each time one is blindly believed it is a mark against ones maturity. Maturity in a sense is one’s ability to discern for themselves whether or not a belief is valid or not. Think of it like this: when you were a child it was easy to believe in Santa Claus, it makes perfect sense that big jolly white guy would load up a sled each year to deliver millions of presents in one night. Now it seems preposterous to think that one could ever believe such a harebrained scheme. That is because we are mature enough to realize for ourselves, based upon the knowledge that we’ve gained in life, that the notion of Santa Claus is not plausible.
One must not be mistaken, we do not gain maturity if an older sibling tells us that Santa Claus isn’t real, because we will not truly believe them until we’ve discovered it for ourselves, this is where the maturity is gained. The disillusionment attributed to the gaining of maturity is often a bittersweet feeling, though. The real world is a scary place and when confronted with it one thinks longingly back to the easy answers given by soft tongues. Instead of a shooting star being god winking at you, it is a small object burning in our atmosphere, a harbinger of the bigger and nastier asteroids out there just waiting to pelt earth.
O’ the world is a scary place, this is why we continue to tell our children the same sweet lies, because we look back at those lies with longing, wishing that they could ring true again. Innocence in a way becomes the antithesis of maturity. Once an individual becomes disillusioned, though, it becomes impossible to return to innocence, the cherry sunglasses vision of the world. Maturity hones our ears, makes us see past the bullshit pushed in front of us everyday. It gives us a discerning eye, it allows for us to survive without mommy and daddy there explaining things to us in a simple and magical way.
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The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it
-- Omar Khayyam
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it
-- Omar Khayyam
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
"And my eyes peeled both wide open, and I got a glimpse
Of my innocence.. took back my innocence..
Still got it, still got it"
--I also liked how you snuck that line about Bush in there!
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it
-- Omar Khayyam
Incredible way of explaining that.
Funny how some "mature" folks believe it and live by it.