In the beginning
I’m fascinated by children who have no fear of interacting with adults, the ones who will talk to their doctor or dentist during an appointment as if they’re a peer rather than someone with authority. Some of my fascination may be masking what is actually envy.
With many years, some education, and hopefully some wisdom under my belt, I now know that how we perceived the adults in our lives has just as much to do with how we were raised as it does with our personalities. If I could encapsulate what I was taught as a child into one word, it would be obedience. It came from my parents, grandparents, extended family, and religious leaders. I even sang songs about it every Sunday. As a result, I looked up to the adults in my life. I was taught they had the answers. I didn’t know any other way to perceive the world.
A glitch in the matrix
As we move into our teenage years, we typically start to push some of our parental boundaries. For some, that means sneaking out with friends past curfew. For others, it’s experimenting with substances that had previously been off limits.
It’s the first time many of us realize that adults don’t actually have all the answers, they just pretend to. The cracks start to show. Teachers contradict parents. Parents make bad calls. We start to see that everyone is just figuring it out as they go.
It’s both freeing and terrifying. On one hand, there’s no rulebook. On the other, there’s no rulebook.
Everything is made up
The older I get, the more I see how much of life runs on assumption, improvisation, and confidence. Careers, parenting, relationships, all of it. Most of us are making the best decisions we can with the information we have and hoping it works out.
I shared one of my all time favourite quotes about this last week from Steve Jobs:
When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again. – Steve Jobs
This realization, that much of how we interpreted the world was simply a veneer is a good thing. It’s one that will occur not just once, but many times over the course of our lives.
There is no spoon
We’re all just trying to make sense of things as we go. The people who seem sure of themselves are usually just better at hiding the uncertainty.
But once you see the strings behind the curtain, life opens up. You stop waiting for permission. You start building instead of following. And you realize that “figuring it out” isn’t a phase, it’s the whole point.
So if that’s the case, if it’s all made up and you get one shot at this thing called life, you have to start asking yourself some important questions. Questions about who you are now, the person you’d like to become, and the person you’d like to potentially share this life with.
It’s one of the paradoxes of life, the more you learn, the more you realize how little you actually know.