Maturity
What with picnics, deer park visits, rooftop escapades and furtive rendezvous(es? What the hell is the plural of rendezvous?), it's been a very memorable May 21st and 22nd...ah, I'm being obscure again. First time and last time, I promise.
Anyway, in music class today, for some reason my teacher and I digressed somewhat from discussing Ravel's Sonatine to talking about what exactly constitutes maturity. There's the age yardstick, which is probably the most commonly-used measure, but sadly also the most erroneous one...although, when I say erroneous, it suggests that I have some idea of the delineation between "mature" and "immature"...which I don't. Is maturity relative or comparative? For example, can you only have maturity if there are two or more people to provide a contrast, e.g. "she is more mature than I am, but I am more mature than he is"? Or is there some "absolute" level of maturity, e.g. "I am mature"?
And just what is maturity, anyway? The reason it's linked so conventionally to age is because in general people mature as they grow older. I find this notion a little bizarre, that we try to measure maturity by how many times the earth revolves around the sun. But the reason I said it was erroneous is because you can get an 18 year old who is more mature than, say, a 26 year old. But by what measure of maturity? The way they talk? The way they socialize with people? How they think (and how would you verify that anyway)? The way they respond to problems? Those all sound a bit like criteria for intelligence. Is an intelligent person necessarily mature?
There's a book I read a while ago, where the author indirectly tried to explain maturity. He said that every time someone acts, reflects on that act and subsequently acts on the experiences gleaned from reflection, that person has matured. I don't know, for some reason the idea of a baby learning by experience not to put its hand in fire sprung to mind when I read that. Does that mean the baby has matured? Or is it mature yet? When does someone cross the line from being immature to mature?
Right, well this entry has digressed somewhat from what my teacher and I were talking about, which was basically whether women should date younger men or older men :P She's seeing a guy two years younger than she is, and we both agreed that that's ok at her age (28) because 2 years is really quite a small fraction of 28, as opposed to at my age, where 2 years is 1/9th of 18, and is therefore a relatively much Wider Gap. And then we got onto the whole issue of how men tend to mature later than women anyway, so the gap becomes Even Wider. And then we got on to what constitutes maturity. Anyway.
I've just noticed there are far too many questions in this entry for my liking. Someone told me about this theory he had, that if we were to have all the answers to everything, we would have to die, either because it would take far too long to "know everything" (if that's even possible), or that if we did know everything, there would be no reason to exist anymore. Speaking of which, there's an interesting thought: is knowledge finite? Wahey, that's tomorrow's idleThinK topic sorted.