Abellanosa: Adulting

CROSSING from adolescence to adulthood isn’t just an increase in age by one number. If adulting is merely a movement from 17 to 18 then life should be that easy. Young people, therefore, need to be taught if not oriented to the reality of life as a process that requires patience. In the adult world there are a lot of things that involve “hit and miss.”

Actually, I am reacting to the seeming overuse of the term “adulting.” It’s as if adult life is that easy. Many have forgotten that becoming an adult involves a serious entry into life’s galaxy composed of various existential worlds. In this realm, the human person is without choice but to make choices again and again. Some choices have to be sustained or stood for, others have to be reconsidered, and still many others have to be changed.

We say that many young people of today are not ready for adulthood. This is, precisely, correct. But were we? Who was ready in the first place when he or she entered adult life?

Life is a field of vast choices. We are bound to make errors in some if not many of our choices. Some errors are trivial others are serious. But though we make errors in our choices we are always capable of correcting them. Life does not have a specific set of formula on how choices should be made. We commit mistakes. Some of the mistakes we make are products of some of our choices but some others are not. We have to be forgiving first and foremost to ourselves otherwise we won’t be capable of forgiving others.

In the adult world, life has a lot of dark corners. Much as we want to read things in black and white or even monochromatically, this simply is not or cannot be the case. Grey areas abound not because we want them but because real adult world cannot be without them. These areas are where the mixtures of a person’s unsettled past are found. We need to truthfully embrace however that no one lives a life without gray areas, neither sinners nor saints.

There is no person whose entire or whole being is so lightened up. A life without dark corners is like a house without compartments. Existence is not possible without errors. No one lives life so perfectly to the point of not being capable of fallibility. Life’s dark corners however have their uses. It is in these corners that we take refuge when the promises of the external world become too good to be true. These dark corners allow us to ponder on our limitations. It is through our limitations that we become considerate of others in certain instances where such considerations are most needed.

Things are easier said by someone who is not in the place of the other. Let’s admit it, becoming an adult today is more complicated than how it was twenty or thirty years ago. Generally adult life was equated to employment. People go to school in order to work. Life then was linear, and moving from one stage to another was just like increasing from one point to another in a continuum of age brackets.

Today’s adolescents and young adults are in a way faced with a lot of issues. While some if not many of them are aware that their age is increasing but their souls remain trapped in a web of confusions. They turn to a world that seems to offer various solutions only to find out that such solutions are but mirages or illusions that are basically part of the problem.

These are reflections that came to mind as I spend a few more days with many of my students who are about to enter the university. A few of them have been asking “what is the ultimate reality of life.” That is something that has to be discovered in the process assuming that one exists

Trending

No stories found.

Just in

No stories found.

Branded Content

No stories found.
SunStar Publishing Inc.
www.sunstar.com.ph