It's not just a matter of growing bones and growing bonds, this business of growing, this endless project of being ourselves. More like an evolutionary diagram of a straight ape than a Russian doll living in a nest, our early humanity is not mature but integrated, which lives forever in the person walking this earth today.
One measure of maturity – perhaps the purest measure – would be the courage to put our arms around those former people and bring them closer, to take responsibility for their mistakes and confusion, to refuse to deny, to refuse to despair. Without compassion for what we were, we will never fully own who we are or be open to what we can become. This compassion is the essence of maturity, and if imagination is the edge of compassion, then maturity is not a point we reach on the path of intellectual development but a continuous process of active thought.
That's what Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) explores in an episode of her stunning 1979 essay collection. The Language of the Night: Essays in Literature, Science Fiction, and Fantasy (public library), which also gave us infinite wisdom about the meaning of life.
Long before Maurice Sendak insisted that “a child is the best part of oneself” and that the measure of a well-rounded adult “is to have one's child whole and alive and something to be proud of,” Le Guin wrote:
I believe that maturity is not growing up, but growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best abilities of a mature person are present in the child, and if these abilities are encouraged in youth they will be effective and intelligent in the adult, but if they are suppressed and denied in the child they will explode and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most profound human, and human, of these abilities is the ability to think: so it is our happy task, as accountants, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or just as adults, to encourage that ability to think in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to germinate, to germinate, to fertilize the best green tree, to bloom, to grow the best green tree. it can absorb. And never, under any circumstances, suppress it, or mock it, or suggest that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.
Because fantasy is true, of course. It's not true, but it's true. Children know that. Adults know it, too, and that's why many of them fear the dream. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, everything that is false, everything that is false, unnecessary, and insignificant in the life they have allowed themselves to live. They fear dragons because they fear freedom.
There is no greater freedom than the permission to be completely ourselves, the essence that we must continue to embrace as it continues to expand, continues to reveal its edges and shadows. Echoing Joan Didion's assertion that “the actor—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's life—is the source of self-respect,” Le Guin wrote:
Our job in growing up is to be ourselves. We will not do this if we feel that the work is hopeless, or we are led to think that there is no work in it. Development will be disrupted or distorted if the child is forced into despair or encouraged into false security, frightened or imprisoned. What we need to grow is the truth, the perfection that transcends human goodness and badness. We need information; we need to know ourselves. We need to see ourselves and the shadows we cast. Because we can face our shadow; we can learn to control it and be guided by it; so that when we grow into our power and our responsibility as adults in society, we will have less inclination, perhaps, to give up in despair or to deny what we see, when we have to face the evil that is happening in the world, and the injustice and the sorrow and the suffering that we all have to bear, and the final dignity at the end of it all.
This is the paradox we have to live with as we continue to die: that we are finite but not finished, that maturity is not a precursor to death but the discovery of immortality in us.
Couple that with the lovely Italian storyteller Cristina Campo on the work of knowing who you are and the meaning of maturity, then revisit Le Guin on how to live life to the fullest and the art of growing up.
