A number of wise beings have advised: Don’t seek stability in an unstable world.
These days, don’t check your news feed looking for hopefulness (although it may sometimes be there) to drive away the ugliness.
That might sound like a discouraging message, but I have found it’s a key pointer to the difficult and important work of human maturation. That is, maturity as the process of coming to terms with the reality that virtually everyone and everything in this world is prone to fail us at some point. Those failures may be brief, temporary, or they may be a new reality that will persist for years.
Maturity is to be neither cynical nor overly shocked when people, or a society, lurches, turns mean and unavailable, or in countless ways, lets you down. It’s maturity to acknowledge, wow, that hurts—but not to go into outrage, victimhood or unnecessary drama.
But let’s not lose the nuance of this perspective. It is skillful to ask for help with humility, and receive it when it’s available and when we need it. Often, people can help us—there often are resources we can turn to.
The mature person intuitively knows they can have a reasonable degree of trust in the world—but they must also have the flexibility to adapt quickly when the world fails us. In fact, maturity and resilience is knowing those failures will inevitably come.
For our young people entering adulthood at age 18, I like to imagine a kind of initiation, including the telling of a strong truth: Welcome to adult life here on planet earth. It’s a beautiful, magical, enchanting place- and it’s incredibly flawed. Expect to find friends and kindness—and to be let down on a semi-regular basis. And don’t let that second part take your joy.
As the German mystic poet Rilke wrote:
Let everything happen to you- Beauty, and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
In her brilliant poem on this topic, therapist and meditation teacher Jennifer Welwood wrote:
My friends, let’s grow up.
Let’s stop pretending we don’t know the deal here.
Or if we truly haven’t noticed, let’s wake up and notice.
Look: Everything that can be lost, will be lost.
It’s simple—how could we have missed it for so long?
Let’s grieve our losses fully, like ripe human beings,
But please, let’s not be so shocked by them.
Let’s not act so betrayed.
“Like ripe human beings.” I love that. In other words, like people of maturity, people with a degree of wisdom and perspective.
The greatest peace is a sense of ease and spaciousness somewhere inside you—rather than finding the perfect conditions in the world, having your ducks all in a row. This inner quality of equanimity involves trusting the process; i.e.: that most times, a difficult situation is workable. It’s also trusting that you can ride the ups and downs, the waves of experience, when things go sideways in a big way.
Putting our trust completely in the world is naive. Expecting the world to be reliable is foolish. We mustn’t give away our power and sense of well-being to a world that historians clearly tell us from time to time, has gone, and will go, mad.
