Facebook Publication Date: 3/29/2021 6:03

These days, Arlanna has become my morning meditation.

This morning, she reminds us that maturity is a crucial attribute; never more so than when we turn our minds, individual and collective, to the work of racial justice.

As I pondered, I came to realize a central irony for this work; actual children often have a firmer grasp on maturity than we adults do. If we allow it, they have much to teach us.

That’s because the word ‘maturity’ has suffered from a form of mission drift. One accurate definition of the word maturity is this: ‘holding a clear sense of one’s own autonomy and personal jurisdiction’; this closely correlates with what we so often speak of here: capacity, volition, and agency.

Children have this–or rather and more accurately, they have this until it’s stripped from them. Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development speaks to this; J. Eugene Wright understands and appreciates this well when he contrasts ‘the person one has come to be’ and ‘the person society expects one to become’.

It is this, this dissonance, that challenges authentic maturity, and which also challenges courage, another virtue we will be exploring.

Maturity is yet another word which has suffered from such mission drift, and it’s because of this distorted definition that we don’t really build up this muscle.

These days, maturity is rarely seen as such. Rather than Nancy Adler’s Theory of Life concept where she speaks a state in which one has a clear comprehension of (and responsibility to–my words) life’s purpose, directedness, and intentionality, so many of us define maturity in a wholly distorted way.

However, in this post Ferris Buller world, this is what all too often passes for maturity: cynicism, detached irony, jadedness, a ‘knowing wink’; being ‘in on the joke’. None of these…anti-virtues, if you will allow me–none of these anti-virtues are accurate markers of maturity, and this is not what Arlanna speaks of when she exhorts us to maturity.

Arlanna speaks of being in solidarity with our true nature; this is closely correlated with what we confronted above–‘the person one has come to be’ and ‘the person society expects one to become’, which in turn is closely aligned with the interior rooting and weeding which we do here, always and primarily in service to the North Star.

I use the word ‘confront’ with intention. It is an imperative that we need to excavate to find our true natures; crucial that this work is done well, and a lifelong journey in what I call ‘deconstructing the coat’ that is, stripping away the societal expectations are that are in opposition to true nature.

This takes courage. I do think that the person we have come to be looks a lot like the person we started out being, before society, and the toxic aspects of culture, and our own fears–and yes, our own traumas (the contents of our buckets) turned us away from our true selves.

Maturity, or ‘Maturity’, as the world so often defines it, means living life in a sullen slouch; eyes half mast; smirking, living apart and above.

That’s not maturity. Maturity is open and clear eyes, impish grins that invite others in on not life as a joke at the expense of others, but rather invites in on a journey, where one can laugh with full throat, living with and in, and taking full measure of delight, and wonder.

Maturity means coming back to self. Maturity deeply involves what at first looks like a paradox, but which really isn’t: returning to, embracing, exploring who the child was before the child was stripped. Those who have done inner child work understand this.

This is where courage enters in. The life of the detached and jaded is the life of the coward. The courage which comes married to maturity is open and ready. Ready-ing.

Let’s root. Let’s weed. Let’s excavate.

All in service to North Star, Full Respect Living.

I love you, with clear and knowing and shining eyes. Wide open.

Thanks, Arlanna.

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