Sometimes watching my son grow up makes me think about what
it means to be an adult. The country is
currently quite fond of accusing itself of failing to grow up, so it’s worth thinking
about. My son is only four years old, so
I’ve got a little time, although if ‘time-flyingness’ is an indication (or even
a word) cars, jobs & women are just around the corner.
I’ll start with the idea of ‘growing a backbone’. What
does that even mean? Online
dictionaries, those quaint relics of the early internet, seem to agree that it
means both fortitude & moxie. So: both strength of character that ‘enables one
to endure adversity with courage’, and ‘balls’.
That could be more helpful.
Everyone knows life isn’t always sunshine & roses, that’s
not controversial. Sometimes there are
things that can’t be fixed, or even escaped, and ‘enduring diversity with
courage’ really is the essential skill.
Many people, though, are also stuck
in crap jobs for most of the hours of most of their days of most of their
years, forever perhaps, with no foreseeable end except death or lottery jackpot. And most of the unemployed would even envy
that. They are trapped inside a system almost
defined by its ability to strip meaning from things, and to replace the meaning
missing in their work they find that ‘things that can’t be fixed’ can include their
entire condition; that their everyday can be seen as that same noble suffering. It
means they see the dignity in bringing home a paycheck, no matter how meager,
in taking things on themselves, of being that magnificent beast of burden for
family & community to place their fears, responsibilities & obligations
on- the dignity of soldiering on with the offsetting indignities of working for
something that sees them only as a temporarily useful but disposable asset, lodged
there by insecurity and disopportunity.
If the adversity crowd sees their essential moment when a
profound burden is accepted by the next generation, in ancient wisdoms renewed;
then when you measure yourself by moxie instead, your moment is that in which
you stand up to wrong despite being
less powerful. When they step in front
of their mother to defend her, when they refuse to allow abuse on their brothers,
and when they ultimately leave to find their own path: that is when the moxie
group first sees backbone forming. To
them, then, it makes no sense why the others continue to submit to a system
that uses and disrespects them.
Those that remain & tough it out see it as a courage, but
from the outside it can look like safe cowardice. And for those who have left the system, they
see in themselves bravery to walk a new path, to choose their own values. From another point of view it’s easy to wonder
how much adversity they really handled before punching out, to see them as
avoiding the tough, significant things in life. To see spoiled ‘college
kids’. To see cheaters.
I’d suggest that, ultimately, both these characteristics are
in need, and that the line dividing when to stick from when to sail resides in
a vast gray area, and is probably determined as much by your family and
community as your own personality. It
seems, like in many things anymore, this is a place we could do better at
recognizing that there are often good reasons people stand on a different side
of the fence. I’m not going to try and
convince everyone that every tough question has an impossibly complex &
nuanced answer. I mean that two ideas
can both be right & good, even though they disagree sometimes. And maybe, back to parenting, that flawed
combination has more promise than either alone.
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