Yesterday 08:38 PM
https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/06/1...sv_gnw2qNQ'
"It is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of the upright ape than like a Russian nesting doll, our prior selves not outgrown but integrated, forever dwelling inside the person walking this world today.
One measure of maturity — perhaps the purest measure — may be the courage to put our arms around those former selves and pull them close, to take tender responsibility for their missteps and confusions, refusing denial, refusing despair. Without compassion for who we used to be, we can never fully own who we are or open to who we can become. This compassion is the fulcrum of maturity, and if imagination the fulcrum of compassion, then maturity is not a point we reach along the vector of intellectual development but an ongoing process of the active imagination.
That is what Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) explores in a fragment of her wholly fantastic 1979 essay collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy (public library), which also gave us her abiding wisdom on the meaning of life....cont'd.
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Back a few decades ago it was culturally popular to demean men who were allegedly "afraid of commitment" and who refused to grow up, labeling them as having what became known as a Peter Pan Syndrome. I personally am one of these, although it is nothing I would ever give up or even regret having. I once thought I might be afraid of commitment in the sense of avoiding relationships and a family and a lucrative career and the whole picture perfect American dream. But now that I am older and wiser I realize I was simply pre-commited to something much more important and vital to who I am--my lifelong love for the imagination. It is thru the imagination that I find meaning in this world, and my devotion to this mental creative power is the one thing that I can point to that has made me me. As kids we learned to do one thing, and to do it repeatedly very well, and that was to "suspend disbelief". This playful and childlike attitude towards life is a gift I will never cease engaging in, however much of a "loser" I might be deemed in the relationship dept.
"It is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of the upright ape than like a Russian nesting doll, our prior selves not outgrown but integrated, forever dwelling inside the person walking this world today.
One measure of maturity — perhaps the purest measure — may be the courage to put our arms around those former selves and pull them close, to take tender responsibility for their missteps and confusions, refusing denial, refusing despair. Without compassion for who we used to be, we can never fully own who we are or open to who we can become. This compassion is the fulcrum of maturity, and if imagination the fulcrum of compassion, then maturity is not a point we reach along the vector of intellectual development but an ongoing process of the active imagination.
That is what Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) explores in a fragment of her wholly fantastic 1979 essay collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy (public library), which also gave us her abiding wisdom on the meaning of life....cont'd.
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Back a few decades ago it was culturally popular to demean men who were allegedly "afraid of commitment" and who refused to grow up, labeling them as having what became known as a Peter Pan Syndrome. I personally am one of these, although it is nothing I would ever give up or even regret having. I once thought I might be afraid of commitment in the sense of avoiding relationships and a family and a lucrative career and the whole picture perfect American dream. But now that I am older and wiser I realize I was simply pre-commited to something much more important and vital to who I am--my lifelong love for the imagination. It is thru the imagination that I find meaning in this world, and my devotion to this mental creative power is the one thing that I can point to that has made me me. As kids we learned to do one thing, and to do it repeatedly very well, and that was to "suspend disbelief". This playful and childlike attitude towards life is a gift I will never cease engaging in, however much of a "loser" I might be deemed in the relationship dept.