Greetings! Happy month of May, the famed time for Spring showers and bright flowers. I’m celebrating May with looking into another word starting with “M” — maturity. I’ve found some gems about it to share with you: a few worthwhile thoughts from a few of the best thinkers on the topic, so keep reading for a great treat.
Just a note: if you’ve sent me an email recently, you received an *automated reply* letting you know I’m on vacation from email until the end of May, in retreat TO READ and TO WRITE. In the TO WRITE category, for one thing, there’s this blog.
In the TO READ category, one thing I’m doing is catching up on back issues of an online soul-enriching newsletter I subscribe to called Brain Pickings, published by Maria Popova, where I found the following golden wisdom about maturity. See what you think.
Maturity, maturity, wherefore art thou, maturity?
From the Nov. 25, 2019 issue of Brain Pickings, enjoy!
“Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts,” poet and philosopher David Whyte wrote in one of his most beautiful meditations.
“A generation before him, Anaïs Nin took up the subject in her diary, which is itself a work of philosophy: ‘If you intensify and complete your subjective emotions, visions, you see their relation to others’ emotions. It is not a question of choosing between them, one at the cost of another, but a matter of completion, of inclusion, an encompassing, unifying, and integrating which makes maturity.’
“And yet emotional maturity is not something that happens unto us as a passive function of time. It is, as Toni Morrison well knew, ‘“a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory” — the product of intentional character-sculpting, the slow and systematic chiseling away of our childish impulses for tantrums, for sulking, for instant self-gratification without regard for others, for weaponizing our feelings of shame, frustration, and loneliness. Like happiness — another life-skill we have miscategorized as a passive abstraction — it requires early education, consistent relearning, and unrelenting practice.
“That is what Alain de Botton, one of our era’s most uncommonly perceptive, lyrical, and lucid existential contemplatives, offers in The School of Life: An Emotional Education (public library) — the book companion to his wonderful global academy for self-refinement, a decade in the making.”
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I’ve just ordered Alain de Botton’s book, The School of Life: An Emotional Education, mentioned in the article. If you’ve read it, feel free to share your thoughts in the Comments section.
Thanks for reading!
Your writer on the wing,
Charlene
