At some point, we came to the ford in the river and fell out of touch with what it means to be an adult.
I used to love waking up in the middle of the night and know more hours of rest lay ahead. I think that’s how grownups used to feel about most things — happy with enough for now and leaving something for later. It was like manufacturing hope and attaching a warranty to it.
I wonder about the current mounting collective feeling that adulthood as it pertained to so many generations may no longer be as attainable as before. Adulthood is harder to achieve now; it’s too uncertain — so goes the refrain. We tried delaying adulthood, to no avail, so the zeitgeist is now fixated on cancelling it altogether. The only way to eliminate a cockroach is to kill it.
But try as we might, we cannot cancel adulthood, any more than we can “achieve” it. Adulthood today may seem a familiar face luring from an unfamiliar time, but it’s there, inescapably there.
Besides, adulthood is where hope comes to find its apogee; when we are at our most fully developed — and empowered — to fulfill our dreams. It is earning a chip and a chair at the table of Life, and going all in.
You ask yourself how adults from the generations that immediately preceded us, those who grew up or came of age during the Great Depression and World War II, the so-called “greatest” and “silent” generations, fully owned their adulthood. And you remember: they just decided to.