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The mark of adulthood is the ability to live with loss -- you choose, and you lose.
-- John Lahr
What is asked of adults now is that they stop going forward, to retirement, to Costa Rica, to fortune, and turn to face the young siblings and the adolescents. One can imagine a field with the adolescents on one side of a line drawn on the earth and adults on the other side looking into their eyes. The adult in our time is asked to reach his or her hand across the line and pull the youth into adulthood. That means of course that the adults will have to decide what genuine adulthood is. If the adults do not turn and walk up to this line and help pull the adolescents over, the adolescents will stay exactly where they are for another twenty or thirty years. If we don’t turn to face the young ones, their detachment machines, which are louder and more persistent than ours, will say, “I am not a part of this family,” and they will kill any real relationship with their parents. The parents have to know that….
The hope lies in the longing we have to be adults. If we take an interest in younger ones by helping them find a mentor, by bringing them along to conferences or other adult activities, by giving attention to young ones not in our family at all, then our own feeling of being adult will be augmented, and adulthood might again appear to be a desirable state for many young ones.
In the sibling society, because of the enormous power of the leveling process, few adults…remain publicly visible as models. Because they are invisible, the very idea of the adult has fallen into confusion. As ordinary adults, we have to ask ourselves, in a way that people two hundred years ago did not, what an adult is. I have to ask myself what I have found out in my intermittent, poem-ridden attempts to become an adult. Someone who has succeeded better than I could name more qualities of the adult than I will, but I will offer a few.
I would say that an adult is a person not governed by what we have called pre-oedipal wishes, the demands for immediate pleasure, comfort, and excitement. Moreover, an adult is able to organize the random emotions and events of his or her life into a memory, a rough meaning, a story.
It is an adult perception to understand that the world belongs primarily to the dead, and we only rent it from them for a little while. They created it, they wrote its literature and its songs, and they are deeply invested in how children are treated, because the children are the ones who will keep it going. The idea that each of us has the right to change everything is a deep insult to them.
The true adult is the one who has been able to preserve his or her intensities, including those intensities proper to his or her generation and creativity, so that he or she has something with which to meet the intensities of the adolescent. We could say that an adult becomes an elder when he or she not only preserves those intensities but adds more.
An adult is a person who, in the words of Ansari, goes out into the world “and gathers jewels or feeling for others.” Finally, the adult quality that has been hardest for me, as a greedy person, to understand is renunciation. The older I get, the more beautiful the word renunciation seems to me. We need to re-create the adult and to honor the elder. The hope lies in our longing to be adults, and the longing of the young ones, if they know what an honorable adulthood is, to become adults as well. It’s as if all this has to be newly invented, and the adults then have to imagine as well what an elder is, what the elder’s responsibilities are, what it takes for an adult to become a genuine elder.
-- Robert Bly, The Sibling Society
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