Buildings & Bridges Are Made to Bend in the Wind

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The world can be, sometimes, so hard. There is so much to balancing the realities of today and the assumptions of tomorrow, the hopes, the dreams, the expectations of who we once thought that we once might be.

Were we really made to fight like this, to struggle each moment of our lives, the work days, the abbreviated weekends, the ignorance of our own needs, the subservience to money and to people that wield it?

As children, we see adults as invincible. As adolescents we lick our chops at that rapidly approaching moment when we will become something important. As young men and women we are clueless as to our place in the world. Sometime between nineteen and thirty the world comes crashing down and, like miners deep within a mountain of our own making, we're helpless to extricate ourselves from the crush of everything above us.

The truth is that adulthood is not freedom. It is not authority. It is not everything for which we were waiting. Adulthood begins the moment that you realize that you probably don't matter, that the expectations you must meet might be beyond you, that nothing of import will ever be easy. Adulthood is anxiety. Adulthood is ambivalence. Adulthood is compromise. Adulthood is duty. Adulthood has consequences.

I freely admit that I'm not terribly good at being an adult. I want to be the grown-up that the eight year old version of me imagined, the one that stayed up as late as he wanted and that drank as much chocolate milk as he pleased, both of which I do. I want to be the adult that never tolerated a discouraging word and that never followed a directive with which he disagreed, both of which I also do, sadly.

Sometimes I wish being a grown-up was more like kids imagine it to be.

There's more to this thought but it's past my bed time.