As every year adds on another digit to our collection, some of us tend to believe that we are moving towards wisdom and rationality. Some of us are wiser than our years and some could do with a tad bit more. Year after year we move up the ladder of our lives and as we move forth we also stop and look back. Well, most of us do. At the centre of our lives are the experiences we have and the people those experiences make us. It is also true that, depending on said experiences, our perception of things also varies.
Going by some of the dictionary definitions of the term ‘maturity’, which talks about maturity in a biological sense, post the adolescent phase, we all pride ourselves on being matured adults. Taking into consideration this definition however, “the quality of behaving mentally and emotionally like an adult” a lot of us would probably get flung off our high horse. Of course, being too serious and too ‘grown up’ makes life way to dull, but there is definitely a line that needn’t be crossed. When we look at the current state of most things in our surroundings the word immaturity screams for undivided attention. As adults we relentlessly harp about how our youngsters need to grow up and start living, but we have failed to take our own advice.
The constant grumbling and whining we indulge in about anything and everything bring this characteristic of immaturity to the fore. When it’s too hot, we grumble; too cold, you guessed it, we grumble; to rainy, right again, we grumble and this holds true for almost everything. Lack of maturity is also evident in the decisions we make. When we chide our youngsters based on the decisions they make, do we take the time to check on our own? When we procrastinate over work that needs being done, when we make wrong choices about being honest, when we show our adolescent angst in our outbursts for petty reasons, we are all only doing exactly what we expect our kids not to do.
This characteristic that follows us into adulthood and relentlessly continues also raises its ugly head when we are in the midst of family and friends. Allowing our egos to get the better of us and seldom being the first to apologise shows our lack of understanding and our failure to have ‘grown up’ extremely clearly. When we are around the people we love, all our inhibitions are let go of. We are at our most whiny, our most stubborn, our most illogical and yes, our most immature. Bringing up past mistakes, belittling their efforts, lack of appreciation, all come readily to the fore. It is only when we lose what we thought would always be ours does reality set in.
Being who we are, we also take our nonsense to work. Targeting people, trying to bring them down, gossip, conspiracy, all of it immediately puts our true nature on display. The whole idea of competition also promotes this kind of behaviour. Another word for competition is war. Don’t believe me? Google it. Our problem lies in the fact that we all try very hard to compete and sometimes this competition happens unbeknownst to the other. When we allow ourselves to get into competition, what we fail to understand is, we are doing an injustice to our self above all else. When we measure ourselves against another’s performance, that individual’s performance becomes a yardstick for your own. Thus, we fail to perform to the best of our ability but instead perform only in comparison to the other. One of the most common forms of this mentality comes out when a few try to rile up people about a certain person and/or situation. We all know how frequently this happens. Even outside work, we waste no time trying to convince everyone else to feel the way we do about something or someone. Reality check people, we all have a logical brain, all we need to do is use it. Trying to bring people down, just to sooth your own ego is a reflection of your negatives not the others. I recently came across a very apt one liner on twitter and on a friend’s Facebook status that went like this ‘Kabaddi is a true Indian sport. Everyone gets together to pull down the one person trying to achieve something’.
Maturity doesn’t come with age, because age is merely a number.
