The Catch 22 of Age
When we are young, we fervently desire to know everything, know little, and imitate to gain a sense of power and identity. Over decades we learn more, classify our knowledge as wisdom, and reach a point, varying from person to person, where we settle into a comfortable assurance, a safe-haven, laissez faire world, a reservation with a convenient set of assumptions. Though we don’t know everything, we know what we need to. This attitude provides mental stability in the face of financial insecurity and stagnant job prospects. While children strive to learn, adults either assimilate what is new or see it as an inconvenience, a disruption, and a denial of their assumed omniscience.
One element typical of youth everywhere, and regarded by adults as unreasonable and wasteful and lacking utility, is passion. In all its forms, it is regarded as a transient phase on the way to maturity, that state in which adults ironically long for the youth they’ve tried so hard to escape. Such emotion has no place in the pursuit of goal-oriented success. In a social structure where what is valued is objectified in the form of wealth, rank, and praise of a national status quo, passion becomes extravagance, an eccentricity. Since new ideas can only result from a dismissal of what such a society values, we lamely travel along the same roads, insanely looking for different outcomes that will make our lives better. As the adults who already know what we need to, we reject the unfamiliar as useless, or worse, as threatening.
But passion by itself ensures nothing any more than an intense emotional effort effects a stunning musical performance. Only when coupled with thought does it serve as a creative force, an engine to carry an idea forward. Now, everyone has ideas and dreams, of course. They drift in and out of our heads like puffy, cumulus clouds across the sky, changing shape or evaporating. Stray, pensive moments soon forgotten in the name of utility. Yet, these are moments in which children thrive, and what they lack in the power to put their thoughts into reality, they pursue through fantasy. Resources, control, and discipline, tools available to adults, will not be theirs until a rigid society convinces them to put away childish notions.
All of this is a long way of saying that younger people have the right approach and adults have the capability. How does all this play out in everyday activities? More and more I sense the discomfort people feel as I broach a topic in conversation which doesn’t immediately fit into my companion’s comfort zone. Just as children imitate to identify with something more powerful than themselves, adults do likewise. They listen only to news programs that confirm what they already think; socialize with those who hold similar views; and shun the edgy frontiers of unfamiliar ideas.
Is it possible, the question seems, for our society to become dynamic again, a thinking creative nation of individuals? Yes, and for a reason that many would regard as negative and therefore unworthy as a solution. It’s the simple fact that humans are imperfect, illogical, untidy. For all our emphasis on order and convention, our nature tends toward the disorderly, even the rebellious. After all, it’s not that adults are incapable of passion but that it lies dormant under a blanket of comfort and political correctness. But, luckily, we are an unstable lot and without permission from leaders, parents, churches, or even despite our own better thoughts, that disorderly individual in each of will rise to overcome the stigma of often violent social reaction, and those childish caged passions will escape and service new ideas in thinking adults and the safety and comfort of adulthood will bow to human nature.
