Signs of Endings

Endings and losses are the commonest first sign that people are in transition. These endings tend to be signaled by one of several experiences: 

• A sudden and unexpected event that destroys the old life that made you feel like yourself 

• The “drying up” of a situation or a relationship 

• An activity that has always gone well before, suddenly and unexpectedly goes badly

• A person or an organization that you have always trusted proves it be untrustworthy 

• An inexplicable or unforeseen problem crops up 

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Older but not Wiser

There are reasons why older is not necessarily wiser. You’re never more open to new experience than when you’re twenty. After that, the need to make money, the fear of having no work, the demands of children, the sense that the world is moving in strange new directions, the appearance of unfamiliar forms of expression that inevitably seem less wonderful than the ones that changed your life when you were twenty cause the aperture to slowly narrow.

By fifty, the obvious fact of your own decline is easily mistaken for an intimation of the world’s. And, since there’s never a shortage of evidence that things are, indeed, worse than they used to be, it’s incredibly satisfying to indulge the idea, and easy to confuse it with a veteran’s seasoned judgment.

George Packer, writing in The New Yorker

The path to sainthood

The path to sainthood goes through adulthood. There are no quick and easy shortcuts. An identity must be established before it can be transcended. One must find one’s self before one can lose it.   

M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

When Are You Really an Adult?

What adulthood means in a society is an ocean fed by too many rivers to count. It can be legislated, but not completely. Science can advance understanding of maturity, but it can’t get us all the way there. Social norms change, people opt out of traditional roles, or are forced to take them on way too soon. You can track the trends, but trends have little bearing on what one person wants and values. Society can only define a life stage so far; individuals still have to do a lot of the defining themselves. Adulthood altogether is an Impressionist painting—if you stand far enough away, you can see a blurry picture, but if you press your nose to it, it’s millions of tiny strokes. Imperfect, irregular, but indubitably part of a greater whole.

Julie Beck writing in The Atlantic 

Winging It

There are no grown-ups. We suspect this when we are younger, but can confirm it only once we are the ones writing books and attending parent-teacher conferences. Everyone is winging it, some just do it more confidently.

Pamela Druckerman writing in the New York Times