Time to Grow Down

One concept drilled into me when I was younger, was that the time will come to “grow up.” Meaning, I thought and think, to set aside ways of living that society deemed limited to those who hadn't yet learned better. As we grew older, we were supposed to “grow up”/ i.e. reach up, to the standards society set for adults. Even St. Paul said, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”


Took me awhile to come to terms with the idea that maybe good old Paul was a kind of pleasureless prig.


As I look back on my life, I know the time when I had the most energy and enthusiasm was when I didn’t pay much attention to adult norms. But that’s not quite an accurate statement. I was haunted by those norms, and well aware that I didn’t much comport with them. I avoided growing up well into my young adult life Eventually that ghost of “grown-up” behavior overtook my natural intuitions and I decided, chose, to grow up. So I set aside my childish things, traded long hair and blue jeans for a three-piece suit, traded semi-casual labor for my own office with windows. Stopped playing games for the pure pleasure of them, stopped laughing childishly. Grew up into an alien world.


Became somewhat of a prig myself.


And so much of my natural life energy ebbed away. I tried to do the adult things, because they were and are adult things, but I was forcing myself into a mold that didn’t fit. I ended up in the midst of people who had “grown up” but never really liked it. The result was I rarely did well in that world. I tried, I understood what to do, but, to borrow an old expression, my heart wasn’t in it. Literally. My heart was in abeyance.


My natural friends, I thought, had drifted away. But I know now that they didn’t leave me, I left them.


I’ve come to believe that “growing up” is code for “fitting in,” and I’ve further come to believe that “childish things” ought not be put away. At least not permanently and, to give Paul some credit he may or may not deserve, I note that he didn’t say abandon those things, he said to put them away. Maybe he meant store them up for later. I’ll presume he did. And to go a bit further, I’m not sure he was convinced it was a good thing to be where he was, only a description of where he was in life. I’ll grant him that.


I realize now the direction I must grow is down. Down to my roots. It’s one’s roots that make one strong, tendrils of spirit seeking out the sources of life itself. Finding purpose and purchase in the ground of being, to hold strong against the winds of conformity that sweep across society.


I have little interest now in playing the roles I’ve been assigned, and I think I’m about ready to pay the price. To grow down.


To quote e.e. Cummings:

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”

I shall gird my loins and prepare to live the right life. By going back to my roots. By growing down.