Musings on Growing up

Yesterday I found myself at a coffee shop in an unfamiliar area, killing time before an appointment and meditating on life.  Since becoming a teacher, there are two things I nearly always have on hand:  scratch paper and a red pen.  Put those two together, and this was the result:

You know what growing up means?  It means making decisions, big ones, decisions that come trailing consequences both good and bad, both apparent and unforeseen.  Being grown-up means being aware of just how much you don't know when you make these decisions.  Gone are the days when you knew what you were doing, when an afternoon was sufficient to research an issue and feels sure.  Now you can spend weeks, months, or  years researching, thinking, and evaluating and still come up a little uncertain, because you've made enough decision now to know how many surprise conflicts, issues, hidden expenses, and aggravations yet unknown are waiting just around the bend in the road.  And the prospect makes you afraid, and some of the shreds of adolescence in you will vote for ignoring the decisions altogether.  Turn up the TV, reach for a cookie, concentrate on the other details of life, and let opportunities and decisions slide by while you close the blinds and order take-out.

But those shreds of adolescence are not your enemy, nor should you seek to smother them or stamp them out so you can proceed toward down the path of your choosing toward that bend in the road with grim, skeptical, fatalistic adult determination.  Instead, use all your adulthood to decide which road you will take and to make the best preparations you can--pack an extra pair of underwear, $20 cash for an emergency, and the phone number of the towing company.  Let your adulthood worry and over plan as much as it can for what's coming.  Pack your six duffel bags of clothes and equipment for every weather and contingency.  Then, decision made and unknown future chosen as best your adult self can manage, and with preparations made based on what you know or imagine will be ahead, then gather up those shreds of adolescence and wrap them around you like a cloak.  Tell them that that the grown-up you has prepared for everything, nothing is going to go wrong you can't handle, and, most importantly, convince those remaining bits of idealistic, adolescent you that you are embarking on an adventure and it is going to fun.  Lie if you have to.  Because those fragments of youthful optimism are what's going to keep you from losing your smile and your soul as you go around that bend in the road and get blindsided by the stuff waiting in the shadows.

Those pieces of the youthful you are everything you've spent years training yourself not to be:  idealistic, stubborn, willful, rebellious, naive, and blind.  But all your adult knowledge educated guesses about what's coming up now that you've chosen a path are only going to make you afraid.  Whisper to those shreds of naivete that when difficulties come up they should be as stubborn and pigheaded as they have ever been; give them a free reign to be rebellious.  Tell them you're going to put them back in charge for a little while, and that you're going to keep forward as blindly ignorant of what's ahead as you did when you were 15.  You've used all the adulthood you have to make the decision and prepare as best as you can, the adult open-eyed, grim determination will only lead you to despair along the way.  It takes all the stupidity, blind optimism, and unreasonable, unbearable stubbornness and cheek of a teenager to travel the road ahead and enjoy it.

After all, this is going to be an adventure.  It's going to be fun.