Skip to main content

Growing Up

growing up
A bunny family for a wonderful easter - amazing to think that Passover and Easter are upon us again (source: Creative Thursday.com)		 As a child, I often wondered what growing up would be like and how long it would take to get "there" (wherever "there" is). Now, I often wonder what happened to those childhood years, which accelerate much faster into the past than growing up ever seemed to speed into the future. I am reminded of this when I realize that Tax Day is fast approaching when I am still trying to make a small dent in New Year's resolutions.

At some point, this minor rumination led me to thinking about my recurring, half-baked creative aspirations. The thought of growing up becomes poignant because it seems that we are always "growing up" to get "there", that magical place where we fully realize ourselves to the pride and admiration of our parents, friends, and other loved ones. It becomes clearer that this self-realization never really happens, or rather that our striving for such perfection reveals some fulfillment to some of the promise but at the same time reveals more unsolved pieces of the puzzle. Mental models evolve, priorities shift, and the worldview takes on more dimensions than the aspirations of yesterday - and so the growing up process begins slightly anew and with the same yearning for purpose intact.

John Lennon was famously quoted as saying, "life is what happens when you are busy making other plans." I think he is partially right, except that the planning has deeper origins in that fundamental yearning to dream for the skies and grow up. Funny that I am just now realizing that growing up is more about a changing state of mind than another holiday season or birthday passing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...
2 comments
Read more

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...
2 comments
Read more

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...
2 comments
Read more