Topic: Maturity

Maturity
Maturity. What is maturity? When is one mature? How does one measure maturity? These are
questions that are too often neglected in today's society. We often talk about maturity with little
understanding of what it is. "Jeremy is very mature for his age." "Sarah is so intelligent, but she can be
so immature! She needs to grow up." Although this word is common piece of most everybody's
vocabulary, little time is given to truly understanding it. You don't learn maturity in a high school class
and its deeper meaning is rarely talked about among friends. Unfortunately, this lack of exposure to the
concept of maturity results in a lack of understand of how we can improve ourselves as individuals.
First, we must define maturity and distinguish between different types of maturity. Flipping open
the nearest dictionary, one finds that maturity is defined as a "full development." Of course, dictionaries
aren't written in the kind of philosophical depth that we'd like, so we must ask the questions ourselves.
Full development... of what? This leads us to distinguishing between different kinds of development. In
what ways, as human beings, do we develop? Or, put another way, in how many different ways do we
mature? Although there are many ways in which we mature, I would like to focus on the two types of
maturity that are most important in one's personal development: physical maturity and emotional
maturity.
The first type of maturity, the physical, is easiest for us to fully understand. It is a scientific kind of
maturity that is visible and quantifiable. For example, I am sixteen. While this literally means that since I
was born the earth revolved around the sun roughly sixteen times, it more importantly is an
approximated measure of physical maturity. By telling you I am sixteen, you have most like already
assumed that I do not have wrinkles on my face and that chances are I am in relatively good health. We
also measure physical maturity by key milestones in our biological development as human beings.
Infancy. Puberty. For the ladies, menopause. As we grow older, our bodies "fully develop" and are most
easily measured by these real, visible changes in our bodies. So what does this mean for you? First, it
means that you need to reflect upon and understand who you are in relation to your physical
development. One cannot build up false expectations and plan on running a marathon in his or her
thirties quite as well as he or she may have ran it in his or her teenage years, nor can a teenage girl
expect to understand her body the way a forty year old woman understands hers. More importantly, we
must understand physical maturity as a singular element of personal development apart from emotional
maturity.
Topic: Maturity

In that case, how is emotional maturity different? Emotional maturity is one's "full development"
emotionally. Obvious enough, but how do we understand our emotional development? Unlike physical
maturity, emotional maturity is not easily defined. It is not quantifiable. We cannot use a science lab to
calculate an individual's emotional maturity. Emotions are volatile and difficult to understand. Although
everybody views this subject differently, I would like to lay down a few irreducible concepts on the
subject... axioms, if you will. First, development occurs through time. Without time, there can be no
development, no change. As time passes, we, as humans, experience. We experience a whole host of
things: love, hate, victory, tragedy. So, as time passes, we develop by experience. Without experience,
we do not develop. From this, I determine that emotional maturity depends first upon experience.
If that is emotional maturity, how does physical maturity come into play? If emotional maturity
and physical maturity sum to an individual's total level of maturity, then I would define maturity as such.
"Maturity is the sum of experiences and personal convictions that allow for the greatest personal
potential in context of one's physical development." Maturity is our means of making the most of our
lives. The more mature we are, the more we can achieve. It is important to understand in context of
where we are in our development. The average ten year old child is simply not capable of achieving
what the average thirty year old can achieve, nor is that ten year old child capable of dealing with
difficult situations in the same way that a thirty year old deals with them. The child has not had the
experience nor the kind of personal convictions that an adult does.
So what does it all mean? It means that we must strive to be as mature as possible given our
varying situations. It also means that we must reconsider how we teach children to live their lives and
how we govern our society. If age is a measure of physical maturity, then is a woman mature enough to
be a mother simply because she is thirty? Are seniors more mature simply because they are older? Of
course, the older one is the more one has experienced, but experience alone, remember, does not
directly translate to maturity.
Maturity is too often overlooked and misunderstood. Strength, intelligence, and beauty are far
more important in the eyes of society at large. Regardless, it is crucial to understand the importance of
maturity... for your own well being.