Part 5. Youth and Adulthood

The Quest for Completion continues with the fifth excerpt.

Youth and Adulthood.

Youth can be defined as a period of life in which we view ourselves as immortal and indestructible. This confidence is a by product of liberation from dependence on mother's milk (which fails in direct measure as our independence of it grows). I believe the obvious case is in the grandious conduct of some youth, but the result is the same whether a youth is testing his or her limits or not.

Our independence though is arguable and soon muted by experience. Physical pain, the not so gentle teacher, soon educates us to a different view of the matter. Make the pain go away is our common plea. We can be heard bargaining with the pain. I will just stop doing something if the pain will just stop. The "pain adverse" among us perhaps delay this moment of compromise but childhood is only temporary regardless of its duration.

This growth is in fits and starts. The pain of social rejection leads to changes in one's conduct. In my youth, I could act selfishly but always had to deal with the barrier to greater productivity in that course of conduct. In behaving socially I could expand my repertoire and success rate. In effect, true selfishness required a change in how I obtained what met my needs. Having obtained social acceptance, our self-confidence returns with a renewed vigor that in socially acceptable conduct we can more fully be indestructible and immortal.

It is ironic that adulthood only leads to a more subtle argument about my indestructibility and immortality. They call it humility. What makes me an adult? I now hold the view that I am mortal and dependent on my surroundings and in being separate I have no being. I am part of the whole, an island not! In procuring the indestructibility and immortality of the whole human race, I procure my own.

I believe based on my life experience that acceptance of my limitations has made me more human and capable of behaving humanely towards others. I have had to look beyond my personal success in having my needs met towards what makes me a successful person, my capacity and enaction of conduct which can be termed indifferent to my personal success, disinterested behavior, doing the right thing even if it does not support my enlargement or grandiosity.

A true parent is such a person because right conduct requires that he do what is right by a child even when that child does not approve of a course of parental conduct. In fact, the child may rage at such parental conduct but true affection for a parent only comes in hindsight and appreciation that the parent was not just well motivated in setting a limit on one's child but that the parent was right to do so. I doubt very much that a parent does the right thing awaiting the day of approval and acceptance by the adult child. If a parent does do so, he or she will spend months and possibly years waiting for that other shoe to drop. The reward is only in doing the right thing.

RJH Saturday, November 22, 2008.