What Age is the right age?
What Age is the Right Age?
By W. Owen Thornton
When I was a kid there was a time when my parents were Gods: they could do no wrong. But as I evolved I came to see them as flawed and as people who set up rules I didn’t necessarily like. There was a time to go to bed, an extra cookie was on the no-no list and playing with friends past a specific time was forbidden. There were too many rules and I longed to be like them, because for a kid, looking up at adults, it seems like adults don’t have any rules.
And then you get to be an adult you find out things are very different. When you were a kid you had school, homework and chores … and then you played or just ‘goofed around!’ But when you become an adult parent you worked – which has longer commitments than school, you study for courses at night, make dinner, do chores, play with the kids, help with homework, discipline the kids when they’re out of line, be attentive to your spouse, find some time to relax in front of the TV or maybe time for a hobby, and you deal with secrets that kids shouldn’t be involved with. I mean the kinds of secrets like the threat that your job is on the line due to lay-offs and what does that mean about keeping the house, or worrying about the future because you’re waiting for the test to see whether or not one of you might have some form of cancer or some other disease. Adults deal with stress at work, rest and play. You worry about your kids becoming independent and yet you don’t want them too independent because they might find themselves in a place to get snatched.
So if we’re not happy with the age where we are either as a kid or as an adult, the question is, what do we do about it? First, kids need rules so we can’t pull those away from them. Second, kids cannot be made to learn about life until they experience a bit for themselves so I wouldn’t bother trying to explain everything. Sometimes ‘because’ is a good enough reason why they should do things. Kids live in a bubble and that’s the way it should be. There are positive ways for adults to help kids stay kids. I believe giving them constant assurance that they are great the way they are, and that they are great in what they do and try to do … this reassurance gives them the space they need to be themselves.
One thing where I think we go too far is in attempting to teach them to be adults too early. I dislike ‘agenda-izing’ our children: giving them agendas for all of their ‘commitments.’ Preparing them for the ‘ratrace’ of adulthood is wise, but making them into little adults doesn’t ‘feel’ right to me. I am not a parent, and I am not a guru but as I said, letting them know they’re okay who they are and giving them a place to be kids, might be our greatest gift to them. We might not take away their yearning to be adults, but we can lesson the desire somewhat. They get there fast enough as it is.
So if we can’t do much for the kids wanting to be adults, then we have to do something for the adults who desire the simplicity of being a kid. Adults have the power of reasoning and the education and the intellect to make some positive changes in their lives. If another article in this series of human kindness essays talks about what are we going to drop before we begin something new, another suggestion for adults to reclaim sanity is, ‘What are we going to drop … period.’ We’re doing too much. Stress levels continue to rise. Each generation suffers from more stress than the last. Each generation suffers from more malaise than the last. One series of chemicals that can be found in any drop of water in the Great Lakes are the chemicals that make up anti-depressants. We need to slow down and lighten up.
Most people would agree that we do need to slow down, but we can’t seem to make this the first step. Slowing down means we must do less. Doing less isn’t the place to start either. The place to start to reclaim our sanity and to be able to practice human kindness and to be comfortable with the age that we are: the place to start is to desire less … then we can do less and then we can slow down.
Desiring less is often equated with ‘being less’ but I disagree with this sentiment. During this stage in North American social development success seems to be equated with ‘things’ and busy-ness. Want fewer things, become less busy and suddenly you’re seen to be less of a person. You will be ‘weird’ or a ‘failure.’ Being a success in North America means running yourself into the ground. Your level of stress has become a badge of honor. You’re equated to how many things you get done in a day, week, month, year, and lifetime. He/she who does the most wins … and usually dies of stress related diseases way too young! If we had done less, slowed down and focused on what we’re really good at and what we enjoy, we’d have gotten more done because we would have lived longer, because we would have been happier in the process.
The example of my friend whom we’ve met before comes to mind. She feels like a failure as a mom because she has to work long hours, but when her kids are sick and she has to stay at home, she feels like a failure as an employee. Many people feel this double-sided life pressure and here at the human kindness project we believe the insanity must end. There HAS to be a way for people to win!
If we are going to change … drop many unimportant things and focus on the ones we do best there is one cautionary note I must include here. There are some things you don’t like to do that will still have to be done. An example of this at home might be housework and one at work might be returning emails. It seems that every part of life comes with a few things we don’t like. Now I’m not saying that we can’t stretch out the housework a few days (some of us are over the moon about how clean our houses ‘should’ be), but there comes a point when we have to do some of it. And it’s not like we can’t batch out some blanket emails to cover off a host of questions, but we still have to do it. Even the perfect life or job has a few things in it we must do.
There is this interesting thought to ponder, however. If we are doing more of what we like, we may find that we are more prosperous and therefore we might have more resources to pay someone to do more of the things we don’t like to do. The trick is to find someone passionate about cleaning and customer email responses so that both you and they are happy. It is never wise to delegate all the things you hate to others … they will figure you out and come to resent you for it!
But we’re not talking about eradicating the must-do’s from our lives we’re talking about eliminating the sorta-like-to-do’s. First, if we like to ride horses, play ball, go golfing, do ballet, work on projects around the house and we feel like none of them are being done well its time to focus on one or two of those things and drop the rest. Even at work we have all learned about the 80-20 rule where 20 percent of your clients yield 80 percent of the revenue. Why then do we continue to serve the bottom 80 percent who often take up far more time and resources than helps the bottom line? While we’re ‘afraid’ we won’t reclaim the revenue should we ditch those awful clients, it is interesting to think about what would happen if we didn’t have to serve them but could focus on either the big 20 percent (and growing that portion of the business), or spend some of that new-found time finding the next great big client we’d love to serve.
I believe desiring less must come with greater focus. We must focus on our strengths and play to them. Attempting to overcome our weaknesses is a fool’s game. Marcus Buckingham, in his Gallup Survey books like “Go Put Your Strengths to Work” suggests that we don’t change as much as we become MORE of who we are. Should we take a personality test and then take it again 20 years later the deviance which indicates we’re the same then as now is almost always the same at between 0.7 to 0.9. We really don’t change that much in our lives, we just get better at the things we naturally do well!
Focus comes in two stripes as well. If we focus on our strengths we must also be able to focus on what our lives will be like when we first drop several things we’re average at and concentrate on the one or two things we’re great at! We must be able to see ourselves happier, calmer, reacting better with our children, enjoying ourselves more … even if we have less stuff. We must see ourselves desiring to do less. We must be able to say no. If someone asks us to do something we should be able to close our eyes and envision where our lives are going. Because we already have a vision of where we’re going in our lives we can easily see our lives with this new task added to it. Can it be done easily, worked in easily? Does it take us too far off course? Does it keep us on course, or take us on a new one that is even more desirable than the one we imagined?
If we see this new vision with this new added task is desirable, we must attempt to picture the stresses and the time it will take to meet this new commitment. If it’s still desirable, what might we have to let go of before we can truly say yes.
If the people asking us to do a new task cannot wait for us to have a couple of days to seriously mull this over, than the answer must definitely be no. The new task has to work within your simpler life. If we say yes and we lose family night with the kids, and we’re unhappy and surprised about this turn of events, we’ve just backed ourselves into a commitment that is making us unhappy and we’re going to start resenting the task along with the person we said yes to in the first place.
Just because we would like to do something doesn’t mean we should. If we have a path for ourselves and we know what we’re good at (difficult but doable) then it is easier to see what takes us off path, or what compliments it. What we need in our lives is vision. Where does vision come from? Here’s the kicker. I think vision comes from how we treat our kids. If we treat our kids as kids – like I said earlier by giving them constant assurance that they are great the way they are, and that they are great in what they do and try to do, this gives them the place they need to be to be themselves. If we give kids that gift, then it becomes easier for us as adults to like ourselves the way we are. We can like ourselves the way we are, have less stuff, and greater vision for our futures.
Now don’t despair. If you didn’t receive that kind of treatment as a kid, you can reclaim it. It takes work and perhaps a little psychotherapy but it can be done. For those of us who did get it, what we have to do is remember it. Your parents didn’t love you for your achievements. Appreciating what you did was a bonus. They loved you because you were worthy of their love because you existed, because you were their child, because you were unique in ways they could never have imagined. And because they told you these things you know who you are and what makes you happy. Envision it, and it shall come to you. And when you are on your correct path, desiring less, doing less, and focusing on your giftedness you will really get more done. You will find greater happiness, more love and more success in places where you never would have looked before. You may not end up where you previously thought you would: a mansion somewhere on a golf course. But you may discover that you don’t like working so hard so that you can have a maid. And you may also realize that it was everyone else who liked golf so much, but it really wasn’t you. Setting up that word-working shop in the basement of a smaller, less-clean house may really be your style. What’s wrong with that as long as you’re happy and can, once in a while, practice a little human kindness? If you reach this goal, then you will once and for all discover that the right age, is the one you are!
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