Becoming an Adult

I got to thinking today about where I am in my life and what I'm going to have to be doing in the near future to make sure that I am going to "make it" in life. As I was pondering over this, I had a thought come to my head. I guess you could call it more of a quote and ever since I've thought about it, I've heard it a couple times which I guess could be a sign that I needed to write about it so it isn't just sitting in my head for weeks. The quote people sometimes say is, "You can't know where you're going unless you know where you've been."

Now the thought of growing up had always appealed to me as a kid but as I moved throughout the different stages of my life, my perspective began to change. I always wondered what it would be like to be successful in the things that I did and how I would one day have all my dreams come to life. I guess you could say that I was naïve or that I was living a fantasy but growing up has taught me things that I would have never learned if I didn't experience them for myself. Just to clarify on what I mean by this, I figured I would share one with you.

Friends will be friends as long as you are the type of friend that you think they want you to be.

Now this can be confusing to some (well, probably all since it is my confused mind trying to speak English) and so I might need to explain. What I mean is that when you are growing up, you aim to have friends that like/love you for "who you are". However, how can we expect to be ourselves when we are always trying to fit in. Yeah, we shouldn't all give into peer pressure and do disastrous things but to some extent, we become those that we surround ourselves with in particular ways.

I watched a some little kids playing in the street the other day and tossing a ball between the group of them. All was going well until one kid, who was clearly more athletic than the rest, stretched out and dove from the sidewalk to the lawn of a nearby yard in order to catch the ball. Seeing this unfold before them, you could see the others get huge smiles on their face and marvel at the stunt their friend has performed. Now it wasn't anything spectacular like the one hand catches that you might see on Sportscenter, in fact, the "leap" was probably less than a foot, but to these children, it was a death defying feat. Once the athlete dusted himself off, he threw the ball to another kid a couple yards away. This is where I began to see something interesting happen. The child who the ball was being thrown to also tried to stretch out and dive to get the ball only he was not as athletic as his friend and he was a good two or three feet further than his althetic friend was standing when he had also dove for the ball. This all resulted in the kid hitting the concrete of the sidewalk full force and missing the grass by a long shot. He got up crying and ran up the street to his house so his buddies couldn't see his shame any longer. Many would say that he was just being a boy and trying to out do his friends, but I saw this event in a different light. Did this child think of the consequences before he tried to copy his friend? No, small children rarely do. Did he intend to be hurt in the process? No, I don't think anyone does. So why would he jump? He was trying to be like his friend. He was trying to emulate something he branded as desirable.

What does this story have anything to do with adults? In a way, we also take leaps that we fully know that we aren't capable of making. Do they always turn out for the worse causing us to experience pain? Not always but there are times that that is exactly what happens. So why do we do things the way that we do?

I read a quote today that became my answer the more that I mulled it over in my head. The quote is:

"We never really grow up, we just learn how to act in public."

This is such a true statement to me. We don't ever really grow up. No matter what the age of a person may be. To some extent we still get upset and pout, get that feeling in the pit of our stomach when we know we've been caught in a lie, and we are always mesmerized when the dessert cart rolls up to our table at a restaurant. We still have people that we try to befriend and impress. We wouldn't spend the amount of money that we do on make-up, hair products and other cosmetic materials if we didn't. In reality, we are just like the children that we see in the neighborhoods around us. In a way, we will always ooo and ahh over John's new bike, we have just moved up to sports cars. We will always think that Sara's doll are better than ours, we have just graduated from action figures and dolls to boyfriend and girlfriends as well as husbands and wives. Instead of the biggest insult we could receive being "I'm not playing with you anymore", we gave moved onto more cruel and nasty remarks.

No matter what our age is, we still act the same as we did when we were kids. We just do things on a larger scale that we see to be more "grown up". In reality, we are never more grown up as the time passes, we just learn how to apply that which we learned when we were small a little bit more to our lives.