Maturity: A Selection from David Whyte’s Consolations (2020)
MATURITY
is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts, most especially the ability, despite our many griefs and losses, to courageously inhabit the past, the present and the future all at once. The wisdom that comes from maturity is recognised through a disciplined refusal to choose between or isolate three powerful dynamics that form human identity: what has happened, what only looks as if it is happening now, and what is about to occur.
Immaturity is shown by making false choices: living only in the past, or only in the present, or only in the future, or even living only two out of the three.
Maturity is not a static arrived platform, a golden epoch from where life is viewed from a calm, untouched oasis of wisdom, but the dissolution of living elemental frontiers between what has happened, what is happening now, and the consequences of our past; first imagined anew, and then lived into the waiting future.
Maturity is the breakdown of elemental frontiers, between different epochs of our life, between life and death, between the part of us that has been a fine, upstanding citizen and the darker, helpless parts of us that have caused harm and damage. Maturity is the time when these tidal forces meet and break apart our life, making one life out of our regrets, our self-compassion, and our forgiveness forged into a future made real by a radical change in our behaviour: real maturity can only be sustained by real silence, by a daily discipline of silence and an inhabitation of spaciousness, a foundational giving away. Maturity is the discipline of giving up and giving away, to see what is left and what is real.
Maturity calls us to risk ourselves as much as we did in our immaturity, but for a bigger picture, a larger horizon; for a powerfully generous outward incarnation of our inward qualities and not for gains that make us smaller, even in the winning.
Our previous stage of immaturity always beckons, offering a false haven and false accounting, an ersatz safety in one state or the other: a hiding place and disappearance in the past, a false isolation of the present, or an unobtainable sure prediction of the future. But maturity beckons also, asking us to be larger, more fluid, more elemental, less cornered, less unilateral; a living, conversational intuition between the inherited story, the one we are privileged to inhabit, and the one – if we are large enough and broad enough, moveable enough and, even, here enough – just, astonishingly, about to occur.
—David Whyte, “Maturity,” Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (2020)
