What Is Maturity?
What is maturity? This impending lesson overshadowing the growth of our lives. Is it when we have learned what we needed to? When we have mastered staying cool when our insides are screaming? Is it having learned the art of how to put yourself first always while make it seem like you are there for the other or the reverse - learning deeply the importance of being there for people without making it feel like in your life you’re not there for yourself?
Is maturity the knowing of the constant breaking and not steeling oneself against it? Is is accepting one more heart break, each time, until true death although they all feel like a death anyway… just to know the heart is still capable of healing enough to feel? More than proving you can take it one more time?
Is it how I wait to cry when I’m in the car or let them pour in front of you? Is it comforting or being comforted? Is it on a side of an opposition or something constantly between everything; its own secret third space?
Maybe it is loving knowing we will say good bye and hating knowing it doesn’t happen very often and for never a good enough reason but knowing it as human all the same.
It could be when I call and don’t let myself get defensive in the first words, taking initiative but not with expectation of the worst. Taking initiative with hope, taking it like the first teeth of the steel blade biting into a plank of wood at hopefully the right angle. Sometimes I think it appears as course correction instead of pushing on.
Right now I feel it is knowing you think I am too friendly with the squirrels and that perhaps on one hand you are right because if I leave the door open I find them in my kitchen but also knowing I simply do not care about this as much as you do and that I want to share my bread and cherries with them; I would rather be too safe than too dangerous. I would rather all living things feel they could cross my threshold even if I don’t particularly want that because it is better than the opposite.
Maturity might be knowing I cannot keep all the plants alive and not let this stop me from trying; not letting this keep me from watering them and wondering about them but also not putting too much of my own worth on what withers and thrives. It is knowing the amount of energy and control I have to give to even the most menial of situations and allowing myself to exercise it as it feels good to me.
It could also be so simple - the courage and ability to act on what we know is right instead of what we know we want, what we know would feel easier.
I think it’s all about feeling. About being the person you can trust the most in your life.