Growing Up
January 20, 2012
When you’re young and looking up into the world of Grown Ups it is hard to understand why Grown Ups don’t have a better understanding of Kids. After all: all Grown Ups were once Kids, without exception. It is hard to understand why Grown Ups worry so much, or struggle, or are so unhappy when they get paid for their work and can choose if they want to go to work each day and can stay up late and eat whatever they want even if it’ll spoil their dinner. If a Kid asks a Grown Up about these things the Grown Up tries to explain about responsibility and making good choices and experience, but the explanations seem to fall short. They don’t seem to tell the whole story. The Kid understands, but imperfectly. The Grown Up tells the Kid: “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
You’ll understand when you’re older.
The thing no one tells you about growing up is that you don’t just get bigger and stronger and more responsible: you get smaller too. When you are a Kid you are all things: a fireman, a ballerina, the president of the United States; you can build an entire city in one day or fly a spaceship to another planet or throw an elaborate party full of royalty and if you get bored of being someone or doing something you can just change and be someone else for a while. No one tells you that when you grow up you only get to be one thing. No one tells you that when you grow up it takes an extraordinary amount of work and time to accomplish extraordinarily little. Little by little we lose pieces of ourselves: we discover we’re not brave enough to be a fireman, not lithe enough to dance ballet, not well connected enough to be the president… We discover who we are by discovering who we’re not and once you take away all the could’ves and should’ves and would’ves you gradually come to realize that there isn’t much left.
You tell yourself that it’s OK: there’s no shame in being diminished but good, small but strong, humble but hard working. You believe it too, because it is true. But there is still a part of every Grown Up that wants to move mountains and build cities and fly on silver wings and can’t understand what is preventing them from doing so.
“Where did this gap come from?” You wonder, “How did my dreams get to be so far away?”
You wonder if you could still reach them. Maybe you even try to reach them and discover they are always just beyond your fingertips. The gap below you seems to become wider and deeper beneath your feet; filled up with worry and doubt and procrastination. Not everyone makes it to the other side. Not everyone tries. And not everyone wants to see you reach the other side if they can’t do it themselves. They lob scorn and doubts and endless, unproductive tasks at you trying to weigh you down in a thousand small ways to make you fall short. To be a Grown Up is to be in free-fall.
When you’re young and looking up into the world of Grown Ups you can’t see this leap of faith; you see only flight. When you’re young you stand on dreams as solid and real as the ground beneath your feet. You are so weighed down by your own potential that it doesn’t occur to you that it could be any other way. You wonder when you too will be able to fly. You wonder where your wings will take you and you don’t think about where you might land. You figure, you can always take off again.
I wish someone had explained to me that someday I would find myself falling and that it would look a lot like flying.
