I’ve learned that maturity has more to do with the types of experiences you’ve had and what you’ve learned from them and less to do with how many birthdays you’ve celebrated.
You can take a lot of journeys around the sun and learn very little, whereas the experience of living through something significant can cultivate far deeper catharsis in a person, thereby forcing growth and potentially, maturity.
Whether desired or feared, circumstances come along and shape us in many ways. The best any of us are able to do is to see the stimuli for change for what it is, and decide whether or not we are willing or capable to mature in the process.
The Covid crisis has been one of the greatest examples of this that any of us have ever lived through. Beyond the destruction of life and business and income is a sociological variable that is making all parties truly contemplate our existing priorities and assess the choices that we continue to make in that regard.
It strikes me that everybody encounters the same overwhelming set of variables in a crisis like this one. Separate and apart from how severe those variables ultimately present themselves based on a person’s health, financial or employment parameters (which, admittedly are vastly disparate from person to person) each person is confronted with an extreme new set of variables from which they must navigate their path in life.
The ones who are ultimately most resilient are the ones who have seen the writing on the walls earliest and are readily adapting to the difficult circumstances confronting them. I don’t think this comes from being older and wiser so much as them having a core ability to spot the combination of threats and opportunities that such a situation delineates.
How many people in your world were selling personal protection equipment in 2019? How many do you know now? Those individuals saw the writing on the wall and acted in a definitive manner specific to the crisis at hand.
Many of the people I know who made a career shift as a result of Covid were younger and potentially more pliable in their approach to making things work in life. With a certain degree of elasticity in their overall construct, these people evolved quickly into a survival mode.
All of us would like life to operate as we expect with predictability and accountability and fairness and commensurate reward. Sadly, none of this is based in reality, it is only based in a societal expectation that has seldom stayed consistent for any length of time without a new and massive evolution.
Pliability and adaptability strike me as the survival variables that enable the fittest of the species to thrive as Darwin would so readily point out.
Make your limited trips around the sun pay off in ways that you might never have expected by staying aware, vigilant and malleable.
Happy Monday😊
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