If the spiritual task of adolescence is to find yourself, the spiritual task of young adulthood is to find others.
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“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”—Mark Twain (source unknown)
If the spiritual task of adolescence (12-18) is to discover what’s special about you (to find yourself), the spiritual task of young adulthood (18-25) is to find others—viz., to discover what’s ordinary about you, what you have in common with others.
Those who fail to complete the spiritual task of adolescence “lead lives of quiet desperation” (to borrow Thoreau’s phrase): they’re actors playing parts they did not choose, reading from scripts they did not write. These are the people who hit a massive mid-life crisis at some point and, like Tony Hoagland’s father, “hail disaster like a cab.”(1)
Those who fail to complete the spiritual task of young adulthood are, in my experience, even worse off. They go through life like moody teenagers: perpetually pissed off and petulant. Though they’re usually too smart to admit it, people of this stamp secretly suspect that their suffering is much greater than that experienced by the rest of us. And they hate it—really hate it—that no one ever seems to understand them—really understand them! Alas, if they could only get over themselves for a moment or two, they’d realize the extent to which we’re all “walking through the sunshine / singing / in chains.”(2)
There are of course other (equally important) spiritual tasks associated with later stages of the life course (at least three more big ones, I suspect). But I’ve only just recently turned 40, and, as a consequence, I’m really not sure what they are, or what they’ll entail. Truth be told, I’ve always been—spiritually speaking—a bit of a late bloomer, which is really just a nice way of saying that it took me far too long to complete the spiritual tasks of adolescence and young adulthood.
—John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2015) * * * 1Tony Hoagland, “Sweet Ruin,” Sweet Ruin (1992)
Every wondered why grandparents get on so well with kids?
I’ll check back in in twenty years time.