Maturity....

by logansrun 8 Replies latest jw friends

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  logansrun

  From Alexei Panshin's "Rite of Passage"

  "It was only after I came back from Trial that I came to a notion of my own as to what maturity consists of . Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the accepted lies ad self-deceptions that you have grown up with. It is easy now to see the irrelevance of the religious wars of the past, to see that capitalism in itself is not evil, to see that honor is most often a silly thing to kill a man for, to see that national patriotism should have meant thing in the twenty-first century, to see that a correctly-arranged tie has very little to do with true social worth. It is harder to assess as critically the insanities of your own time, especially if you have accepted them unquestioningly for as long as you can rekember, for as long as you have been alive. If you never make the attempt, whatever else you are, you are not mature."

  Oh so true, is it not?

  Bradley
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  LittleToe

  No, that's "open-minded". An entirely different term

  IMHO maturity is the application of experience in discernment.
  Thus it can be entirely subjective...
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  Steve Lowry

  When you can pee into a can and drive at the same time, then you're mature! (Jus? kiddin?)

  No really now, I think being mature starts with the child, and his or her ability to make decisions that involve self-sacrifice (even small ones) as well as the ability to recognize the needs of others as well as himself or herself. I think it kinda starts there and develops. When I think someone is acting immaturely it?s usually when he or she is acting inconsiderate and rude. When I see a young person being polite and courteous then I think that that young one is acting like a mature adult. Conversely, when I see an adult acting like a self-centered self-absorbed three-year-old, then I think he?s acting immaturely. I see this in traffic everyday.

  I think a harder question may be this; How does a boy know when he?s become a man? What is the litmus test for this answer?
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  Country Girl

  By the same token: a person who has come to see, and know, himself as self-centered, rude, and impossibly obnoxious, and accepts himself as such, offering no gratuitous apologies for such, is mature in the way that he has come to serenely accept the truth about himself, and is able to live with it. Other people may not see him that way, but then, he believes they aren't mature enough to handle his maturity.

  <grin>

  CG
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  Steve Lowry

  By the same token: a person who has come to see, and know, himself as self-centered, rude, and impossibly obnoxious, and accepts himself as such, offering no gratuitous apologies for such, is mature in the way that he has come to serenely accept the truth about himself, and is able to live with it. Other people may not see him that way, but then, he believes they aren't mature enough to handle his maturity.

  I dunno, I just think that makes him an asshole.
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  myauntfanny

  Well, I agree with Panshin. I think even good manners can be immature if you're just doing what you were raised to do, without questioning whether it makes sense.
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  Steve Lowry

  I think even good manners can be immature if you're just doing what you were raised to do, without questioning whether it makes sense.

  I don't know that I can completely agree with this comment. While good manners may not necessarily be the criterion of maturity, I can't imagine how using good manners would hinder someone from acting maturely. If someone ?thinks? they are using good manners but in reality they aren?t then they have been trained improperly and act so. Good manners are always welcome and I believe are a good sign of maturity.
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  Xena

  I think Panshin's comments are a part of being mature but then so are Steve's...personally I feel maturity encompasses a lot of different areas of life, you see some people who are extremely mature in one area and immature in another. Another aspect of maturity to me is accepting responsibility for your own actions, something that seems to be getting rarer and rarer these days unfortunately.
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  myauntfanny

  I like good manners too, that is, what I THINK of as good manners. But manners are very cultural and subjective, that's all I mean. If I travel to a country where people get too close, or make a lot more eye contact or less or whatever than I'm accustomed to, or all crowd around instead of getting properly in line, then I experience them as having lousy manners and I get very uncomfortable and irritated. But I know that for them, that's not bad manners. That's why even though manners are really important to me, and I might not even like people who don't have MY manners, I wouldn't use them as a criterion of maturity.