Adolescence

A good friend of mine pointed out this out to me the other day (while I was complaning about work) - "You have this me vs the world thing about you - not very healthy leh...."

Yes, I am still a child in a lot of ways, with temper tantrums et all. Always think the whole world has something against me when things go wrong. Never quite my own fault first. =P

Made me wonder what defines adult and adulthood - just in terms of no. of years spent in this world? Baah.... such an inaccurate measure. I know of tons of people, including myself, who are still children and behave like one.

Perhaps we are all just "aged children" for the lack of a better oxymoron.

Then again, when do we REALLY become adults?? Or does the term "ADULTS" exist only as an illusion, never reality??

Interestingly, Frederick Buechner's Whistling In The Dark talked about adolscence today. He had an interesting take on it:

"The ancient Druids are said to have taken a special interest in in-between things like mistletoe, which is neither quite a plant nor quite a tree, and mist, which is neither quite rain nor quite air, and dreams which are neither quite walking nor quite sleep. They believed that in such things as those they were able to glimpse the mystery of two worlds at once.

Adolscents can have the same glimpse by looking in the full-length mirror on back of the bathroom door. The opaque glance and the pimples. The fancy new nakedness they're all dressed up in with no place to go. The eyes full of secrets they have a strong hunch everybody is on to. The shadowed brow. Being not quite a child and not quite a grown-up either is hard work, and they look it. Living in two world at once is no picnic.

One of the worlds, of course, is innocence, self-forgetfulness, openness, playing fo fun. The other is experience, self-consciousness, guardedness, playing for keeps. Some of us go on straddling them both for years.

The rich young ruler of the Gospels comes to mind (Matt 19:16-22). It is with all the recklessness of a child that he asks Jesus what he must do to be perfect. And when Jesus tells him to give everything to the poor, it is with all the prudence of a senior vice-president of Morgan Guaranty that he walks sadly away.

We become fully and undividedly human, I suppose, when we discover that the ultimate prudence is a kind of holy recklessness, and our passion for having finds peace in our passion for giving, and playing for keeps is itself the greatest fun. Once this has happened and our adolescence is behind us at last, the delight of the child and the sagacity of the Supreme Court Justice are largely indistinguishable."