The Art of Adulting: The Little Letter Series: Delights of the Ordinary No. 62 (S2)
Happy Thanksgiving and to the art of growing up.
#TheLittleLetters is my new series where I send you tiny letters of little learnings as opposed to long-form essays. They may help you gear back or throttle up but I promise most of them will be positively wise.
You’ll heal, you know, we always do.
- Nick Cave
In the olden days, just a little earlier than the decade I was born in, being pen-pal was the polite mannerism to nurture long-distance friendships. They wrote letters!
I remember my uncle talking about having a pen pal from the UK. From my partly fading memory, I recall him telling us kids then, that they grew up in the same neighbourhood, but later that kid returned to the UK, once India gained her independence in 1947. And possibly there were childlike promises made between them about keeping in touch and writing letters to each other. And as friends, they did keep their puny promises for quite some time. Yet, in this humbling life, as time transforms and twists things around and makes human beings complacent, their letters started to grow sparse in time and distance and gradually dwindled to the conspicuous calls of life - earning money, getting married, changing cities and worrying about the kid’s future.
for sure it is how the world is!
Mostly to grow older may mean burying the inner glow and turning aloof to things and towards people, who begin to fade from our obvious eye view because of actual distances on the land or distances set in our memory.
Consequently, like most other ways of life, adulting is a challenging process. Our child-like heart has to be made lowly to fit in the dampening demands of the world. To have responsibilities is good but stringent demands are bad because they swamp us enough to drop the charming, chirpy and childlike things of life.
Kelly Williams Brown, author of the book Adulting: How to Become a Grown-Up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps “I think there is a really hard transition [between childhood and adulthood]... It’s not just hard for Millennials; I think it was hard for Gen Xers, I think it was hard for Baby Boomers. All of a sudden you’re out in the world, and you have this insane array of options, but you don’t know which you should take.”
Julie Beck, in her article published in The Atlantic, compiled what people thought adulthood meant to them. Here are two brilliant expressions of real real-life adulting saga:-
At 28, I can say that sometimes I feel like an adult and a lot of the time, I don’t. Being a Millennial and trying to adult is wildly disorienting. I can’t figure out if I’m supposed to start a non-profit, get another degree, develop a wildly profitable entrepreneurial venture, or somehow travel the world and make it look effortless online. Mostly it just looks like taking a job that won’t ever pay off my student debt in a field that is not the one that I studied. Then, if I hold myself to the traditional ideal of what it means to be an adult, I’m also not nailing it. I am unmarried, and not settled into a long term, financially stable career. Recognizing that I’m holding myself to an unrealistic standard considering the economic climate and the fact that dating as a Millennial is exhausting, it’s unfair to judge myself, but I confess I fall into the trap of comparison often enough. Sometimes because I simply desire those things for myself, and sometimes because Instagram.
My ducks are not in a row, they are wandering.
—Maria Eleusiniotis
Another one puts it -
I’m an OB/GYN and watch women struggle through many life changes. I see my late teen and early 20s patients acting more grown up, and thinking they “know it all.” I see my patients learning to be new moms, and wishing they had a guidebook, feeling lost. I see women go through divorce and try to find themselves afterwards. I see them trying to hold onto youth during menopause and after. As a result I have been reflecting [on] this very topic, “becoming an adult,” for a while.
I am a mom, have 3 elementary school aged kids, married (unhappily unfortunately), and I still feel like I’m growing up. My spouse cheated on me—that was a wake up call. I started asking myself, “What do YOU want?”, “What makes YOU happy?” I think like many people I had gone along [in] life not questioning many things along the way. As a 40-year-old woman, I feel like this is the time I’m becoming an adult—it’s now, but it hasn’t completely happened yet. During my marital conflicts I started therapy (wish I had done this in my 20s). It’s now that I’m learning, really learning, who I am. I don’t know if I will stay married, I don’t know how that will look for my kids or for me down the line. I suspect that if I leave, then I will feel like an adult, because then I did something for ME.I think the answer to “when do you become an adult” has to do with when you finally have acceptance of yourself. My patients who are trying to stop time through menopause don’t seem like adults even though they are in their mid-40s, mid-50s. My patients who seem secure through any of life struggles, those are the women who seem like adults. They still have a young soul but roll with all the changes, accepting the undesirable changes in their bodies, accepting the lack of sleep with their children, accepting the things they cannot change.
—Anonymous
“We never really grow up we just learn how to act in public”
―Bryan White
I am just like you. A human. Someone who is learning life with some broken answers through her writing. But the best wisdom I have learnt all this while as I have gleaned closer is:
we continue to accept the outcomes we cannot change.
and in the words of Kevin Kelly, “The greatest killer of happiness is comparison. If you must compare, compare yourself to you yesterday.”
And could be you are in your twenties or your forties, we are all still figuring it out. That is why letters are a good thing because they are like reminders of our ordinary catastrophes which we would generally not google about. We may google how to ease our backache or how to pop a giant pimple, but adulting well is an extremely far-off problem especially when we are dealing with annoying backache, pimple or to say your boss! And so with all these simple reminders which are just as utterly complex to practice in our real lives, we can together ponder and try to navigate and sift through the changes and caprices of living on this planet.
And as we wind down this year, slowly wrapping it up, I aim to call you to maintain a thanksgiving posture through the remaining year because all of us - you, me and my neighbour (who I have not seen to date) is fearfully and wonderfully made, and I am grateful for it.
Can we now look at life with a plenteous amount of thankfulness!
To end:
"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering...these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love...these are what we stay alive for."
- Robin Williams
I hope you spend the weekend with immense thanksgiving and please, for the love of life, read more, scroll less.
-Anugrah
Delights of the Ordinary is for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone. This newsletter intersects culture, art, science, and philosophy with our practical 9-5 job space.
Who am I?
Hi, I am Anugrah. You can know more about me here. I write Delights of the Ordinary which currently is a free publication. Yet it takes me many hours of effort to write and curate it. I may need lots of coffee to keep me going. You can :)
Stumbled on my publication? Explore all my previous editions here. And in case you don’t wish to spend time browsing then complement this post with The Antidote for Self-Doubt, We Imagine Because We Are Living or read about Decision Fatigue and Our Creative Life.
If you ever feel like dropping in a message or a comment, do not hesitate. We all can only thrive in people. We can be those ordinary creative beings who can change the world. You and me.
I’m glad I stumbled here on a Monday. I think you should write more often.
I like the concept of pen-pals. I always feel happy to read your letters... Thanks for taking the pain and writing consistently...