A few years ago, I was driving along a motorway with my husband and kids. It was hot and the air was stale, my passenger-seat compartment strewn with tepid water bottles and keep-cups and empty Pom Bear packets. We’d long outgrown our tiny bashed-up city car but couldn’t stretch to a bigger one and so packing involved a complex Jenga game of maximizing space while avoiding a child being crushed by a suitcase. My daughter was in the back singing along to “When I Grow Up,” a song from the musical Matilda. In her reedy, unselfconscious voice she belted out Tim Minchin’s deceptively simple lyrics, which predict a future in which the children singing will be grown up enough to know how to answer hard questions, strong enough to carry heavy things and brave enough to fight the monsters underneath the bed.
The chorus, beloved by kids everywhere, is all about eating sweets and staying up late to watch endless TV, but it was these verses and their childlike melody that landed that day like a punch in the heart. The irreconcilably bittersweet nature of adulthood was suddenly too much. I am purportedly a “grown-up,” but don’t know the answers. I feel bone-weary from carrying around heavy things. I hate that the monsters exist, and that they often win, and that some of them live in me.
I broke down and started sobbing, my heaves so abrupt that my husband pulled the car over in concern. I didn’t want my daughter to have to grow up into this world. I wanted her to find, as the song promises, that being a “grown-up” really is about doing what you want in a cartoon world of freedom, not this discombobulating cocktail of beauty and heartbreak, despair and delight, the longing for justice and our own utter and bewildering failure to enact it. I don’t think this conviction that the world should be different, that we should be different, is unique to those who procreate. Honestly, I think the grief is also for myself, for the child I used to be, the innocence I have lost. I would like to put the apple back on the tree, please, because the knowledge of good and evil is just too damn painful.
I don’t think I am the only one who feels this. We joke about “adulting,” the drudgery of paying bills and sorting out a pension, but it can’t be just me who hears the seriousness thrum underneath. What kind of person am I becoming, with all this living? What kind of person do I want to be becoming? What part am I playing in the tragicomedy we all find ourselves in?
Growing up must, surely, be about more than ticking (or failing to tick) achievements off an arbitrary list. It must be about something deeper, yet the stories that used to orient and guide us, handed down through generations of our ancestors, seem to have gotten lost in transit.
Today’s plural, secular, Western societies have gifted us many things, but reliable sources of communal meaning isn’t one of them. So many people I speak to crave places to belong and ways to settle their soul. Technology has freed us from drudgery and offers endless ways to increase our comfort and convenience. Product after product promises to boost our status and performance. Optimize and maximize. Up and to the right. In lots of ways, we’ve never had it better. But still there is a malaise, a sense of impending threat, which many of us feel in our least defended moments and don’t know how to speak about. The news scrolls unendingly with stories of war, disease, deepening division, the rise of authoritarian governments and the unimaginable but rapidly approaching prospect of climate collapse. Accelerating advances in AI may turn the world upside down in ways no one can predict. Against this ominous global mood music, we have unlimited choices in framing our identity, but this freedom can sometimes induce vertigo rather than exhilaration. Many of us feel isolated and anxious, or too distracted and overworked to feel much at all.
In the 1930s a man named Thomas Merton was part of a group of “irreverent and hard-drinking . . . proto-beatniks” who were similarly dismayed at the state of the world. University educated as they were, the prospects that mainstream society offered looked less and less appealing: “The world is crazy, war threatens, one has lost a sense of identity. . . . People are dropping out. . . . The rest of us are just lost.” The cry of Merton and his friends then echoes now: “I am not [only] physically tired, just filled with a deep, vague, undefined sense of spiritual distress.”
I don’t want to live in spiritual distress. I want to be fully alive.
As I head for my forties, I wonder where all the grown-ups have gone. They don’t seem to be leading us. I am longing for there to be more people I can trust, who reliably act with integrity. I want to be trustworthy myself. I crave morally serious people, which is not the same as just being no fun, or being good at pointing fingers at others. My instinct is that morally serious people don’t have to perform their virtue. They’ve learned and suffered and let stuff go. They are resilient, kind and open. They know how to laugh, even on dark days. I want to be like them.
My ambition now is to be a “non-anxious presence,” to make people feel more peaceful when I’m around. I’m currently too scattered for that. I want to be brave and generous and free, and on those I also have a way to go. Sometimes, when I catch myself moaning about some triviality, trudging through a day made grey by my inattention, a voice wells up inside and shouts, “There must be more!” Yes, I can be sort of intense.
This longing to be fully alive, to know how to steady myself, has made one thing clear. My aim is not, now, a big glitzy hedonist life, nor staying within the tram tracks of a tidy conformist life. I want depth. I feel the need for roots, for spiritual core strength. As I look at the future, I want whatever is the equivalent of Pilates for my soul.
Every generation thinks the world is ending, but maybe we are right. Maybe the apocalypse is coming and we can’t stop it. Once I’ve processed the emotions that thought provokes I want to be the kind of person that is needed at the end of the world. If we’re headed into (even more) turbulent times I want to be someone who is of use, not overwhelmed and panicking but steady and hopeful, able to contribute to weaving a canopy of trust under which other people can shelter. Instability can make us (me) close ranks and cease to care for those beyond our immediate family and friends. I want to resist that impulse. I aspire to become the kind of person who would have hidden runaway slaves or people escaping the Nazis. Not least because I want to live in a society in which someone might hide me, my friends, my kids. I know I am not that kind of person yet. I am probably not going to grow that kind of character accidentally. If it turns out it is not the end of the world, well, we always need those people. If nothing else the attempt to become one feels more interesting and meaningful than just polishing my CV and going to actual Pilates.
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Content taken from Fully Alive by Elizabeth Oldfield, ©2024. Used by permission of Brazos Press.
