How Can We Be Better Adults?
When we were younger, most of us had experienced a phase in our life when we wanted to grow up quicker. We can’t wait to skip past the transition and get to the graduation. We yearn to be adults, a life stage seemingly indicative of our maturity. We focus so much on where we want to be that we lost sight of stairways as places in themselves. We place our emphasis on A, where we’re at, and B, where we’d like to be. Everything inbetween is merely a means to get somewhere else. We are eager to fast-forward the homework and chores and dive straight into the good parts of driving a car, dating a girl and having an awesome job with funny colleagues. Little did we realise, it is the journey that makes us an adult, not the time.
It is less about what we have that makes us an adult, but more about what we’ve gone through and understood.
When we were kids, we learned about what is right and wrong. The transition between being a kid and a well-informed adult is learning to poke around different areas and realising that parts of life aren’t as arbitrary. Grey area, as we come to know it. However, it is one thing to learn about something and another to do something about it. It is simple to demonstrate how progressive and loyal we are when it costs us nothing. Soon, we learn the value of loss and we begin to cave in to political correctness, professional protocol and a bunch of senseless matters, possibly made better when spun into memes.
Understanding what it means to be an adult is easy. Being an adult is much more complicated.
As kids, when we say the wrong things, most of which are ironically truth, we’re often dismissed as being naive and careless. We pout our lips, reluctantly shake the hands of our victim and whisper ever so silently, “Sorry.” As adults, try calling someone by a wrong name and your entire world starts to collapse. There is no backpedaling or explaining it away. It may be an accident. It probably is. But we’ve involuntarily revealed some impolitic truth. 1. I forgot your name. 2. I mistaken you for someone else. 3. I didn’t care enough to remember you. It is jarring to go through multiple of such transitional episodes to better comprehend what it means to be an adult.
We’re trying, with varying degrees of success, to impersonate what it means to be an adult.
We learn to order food on our own. We learn to ask directions in a foreign languge. We learn to do many things we’ve never thought an adult needs to experience. More importantly, we taught ourselves the ability to learn to learn and with all cases of learning, there is a learning curve. There will be ups and downs, with most down situations being masked as yet another hilarious story to be shared with friends and family. We gradually learn that there will be days when no one is gonna pat us on our back except ourselves.
We learn that nothing much truly matters other than finding our own unique meandering path as an adult — the constant revisit of “What do we want?”
I believe the hardest transition we’ve got to go through is the gut-clenching dread of knowing someone close to us is gonna pass away and actually coming to terms that they’re never gonna be here with us anymore. We’re never gonna share our most helpless, undignified selves of smacking the table and laughing with them. We used to know hospitals to be a place where doctors treat their patients. Yet, with every visit to the hospital, we just hope that we’re still in time. We may not be superstitious, but we begin to walk slightly faster than we need to. There is a grim camaraderie in the halls and elevators. We learn that time moves differently in hospitals, similar to when we’re at the airport. Time moves both slower and faster simultaneously. The minutes stand still, but the hours evaporate. When visiting hours are almost over, do we feel relief, feel guilty or a mixture of both? When we stand at the crossroads of the airport departure hall, do we really want them to go? Much of adulthood is about the words unsaid, not because we don’t know what to say, but how to say them. “I love you. I’m sorry. I miss you.”
