One thing I learned at some point is that growing old or growing tall is not the same as growing up. Being a grownup is about your level of wisdom and the size of your mind’s scope—and it turns out that it doesn’t especially correlate with age. I know some supremely wise older people, but there are also a lot of people my age who seem much wiser than their parents about a lot of things. After a certain age, growing up is about getting more and more grounded as well as clear-sighted, it is about overcoming our foggy mirror state or the superiority of our primitive drives, the reason for all kinds of totally illogical and embarrassingly short-sighted human behaviour, and that’s about the human being, not the age. Someone on a growth path whose fog thins as they age will become wiser with age, but I find that mostly the reverse happens with people who don’t “actively” grow—the fog hardens around them and they actually become even less conscious, and even more certain about everything, with age. When I think about people I know, I realize that my level of respect and admiration for a person is almost entirely in line with how wise and conscious a human being I feel they are. Therefore, the people I hold in “the highest” regard are the grownups in my life—and their ages completely vary.
