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\n\t\t\tIt is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of the upright ape than like a Russian nesting doll, our prior selves not outgrown but integrated, forever dwelling inside the person walking this world today.
\nOne measure of maturity \u2014 perhaps the purest measure \u2014 may be the courage to put our arms around those former selves and pull them close, to take tender responsibility for their missteps and confusions, refusing denial, refusing despair. Without compassion for who we used to be, we can never fully own who we are or open to who we can become. This compassion is the fulcrum of maturity, and if imagination the fulcrum of compassion, then maturity is not a point we reach along the vector of intellectual development but an ongoing process of the active imagination.
\nThat is what Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929\u2013January 22, 2018) explores in a fragment of her wholly fantastic 1979 essay collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy (public library), which also gave us her abiding wisdom on the meaning of life.
\nUrsula K. Le Guin by Benjamin Reed
\nLong before Maurice Sendak insisted that \u201cthe child is the best part of the human self\u201d and that the measure of a well-formed adult is \u201chaving your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of,\u201d Le Guin writes:
\nI believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty, as librarians, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or simply as grown-ups, to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb. And never, under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.
\nFor fantasy is true, of course. It isn\u2019t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it, too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.
\nThere is no greater freedom than the self-permission to be entirely ourselves, an entirety we must go on embracing as it goes on expanding, goes on revealing its edges and its shadows. In consonance with Joan Didion\u2019s searing assertion that \u201ccharacter \u2014 the willingness to accept responsibility for one\u2019s own life \u2014 is the source from which self-respect springs,\u201d Le Guin writes:
\nOur job in growing up is to become ourselves. We can\u2019t do this if we feel the task is hopeless, nor if we\u2019re led to think there isn\u2019t any work to it. Growth will be stunted or perverted if a child is forced to despair or encouraged in false security, terrified or coddled. What we need to grow up is reality, the wholeness which exceeds human virtue and vice. We need knowledge; we need self-knowledge. We need to see ourselves and the shadows we cast. For we can face our own shadow; we can learn to control it and to be guided by it; so that when we grow into our strength and responsibility as adults in society, we will be less inclined, perhaps, either to give up in despair or to deny what we see, when we must face the evil that is done in the world, and the injustices and grief and suffering that we all must bear, and the final shadow at the end of all.
\nThis is the paradox we must live with as we go on dying: that we are finite but unfinished, that maturity is not the prelude to mortality but the discovery of the immortal in us.
\nCard from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.
\nCouple with beloved Italian storyteller Cristina Campo on the work of knowing who you are and the meaning of maturity, then revisit Le Guin on how to live fully and the art of growing older.<\/p>\n