The Significance of Maturity

The more competent we become in dealing with life’s challenges, the easier and more natural it to practice self-responsibility.

“Wrapped in furs, a rich woman from a large metropolis was gracefully coming out of her limousine. Around the age of 10 is carried on a huge velvet pillow by four servants. Passers-by stopped to watch this spectacle of pomp and wealth, cannot help but feel compassion for the rich boy carried by the servants.

A bolder gentleman shouted to the rich woman, “Oh, ma’am, your poor son can’t walk!” “Of course, it can work !!! But thank God he doesn’t have to!” - the woman answered full of emphasis, turning admiringly to her son. “

From childhood, our inner desire is to “be able to see” how we make “things happen.” This is the joy and delight of a small child when he manages to make something happen. In the sense of change, the intrinsic desire to significantly influence the external environment - how do a child’s eyes shine when we tell him to press the light switch and see that it lights up due to his action?!

We still seek to produce this delight in ourselves and adulthood. Our deep need for personal competence can also be met by understanding and developing our ability to be effective in our actions.

The more competent we become in dealing with life’s challenges, the easier and more natural it to practice self-responsibility.

In almost every one of us, there is an awareness that a natural expression of maturity is self-responsibility. The proof is our adult expression of another adult’s behavior: “what a childhood” or “immature.”

For example, if a woman continues to allow her mother to make decisions on her behalf about what to do or not to do in marriage, how to raise her children - we could say that she is immature. Suppose a man refuses to take action and constantly builds alibis and reproaches.

In that case, we say that he is immature - because one of the characteristics we associate with maturity is the sincere desire of someone to be responsible for, which it does.

If we see a person dominated by a hunger for compliments and attention, but still unable to take care of his relationships with others, unable to offer any of the values ​​he instead demands from others - we say that he is “at kind of absorbed in herself, like a child,” because the children being in the stage of identity formation are absorbed only by what they want.

The idea is that we do not associate self-responsibility with a two-year-old child, but we associate it with adults. At least as soon as we get out of the mirror, that’s what we expect of all other adults.

In a fundamental sense, being effective means coping with life’s challenges. We need to have this sense of life competence. It is one of the most critical aspects of self-esteem. In the end, we read even this article, looking for ways to help us respond better to life—especially the challenges posed by it.

We develop our effectiveness only in the presence of self-responsibility and vice versa. The more we practice self-responsibility for the desired outcome in life, the more effective our actions become. The relationship is reciprocal and underlies maturity.

We can get rid of many of the frictions of our adult life if we are willing to question our intellectual and emotional maturity and not just assume it based on a figure of our age. If we stop believing that we have nothing to mature in us after a certain period, then we remain open to a process, otherwise natural, of self-actualization.

Sometimes it can be challenging to realize how much you have matured, how much you have taken into account the experiences you have gone through, and how you have learned from them.

But it is not impossible:

• How conscious and autonomous are they in the choices they make?

• How much do I take responsibility for my own emotions/needs/desires?

• How much do I rely on to fulfill my duties as an adult?

Remember: the more competent we become in dealing with life’s challenges, the more we find that self-responsibility is easier and more natural to practice. And the more capable we are in meeting our needs, the happier we are.