“It’s time to grow up.”
Ugh! The words escaped my mouth before I could wrap them in restraint. It doesn’t matter that I often use the same words when I look at myself each morning in the mirror. They just aren’t helpful when someone else is struggling with their own feelings of uncertainty and inadequacy. Good sense, not emotion, had best take hold of one’s vocabulary in such situations.
Alas, good sense fled the scene when I recently let thoughts become words spoken to someone I care deeply about. As you might expect, the slip neither supported that person nor enhanced the bond between us. Sharing any part of the turbulent stream of often self-inflated commentary that runs through my mind is a risky business. It almost never helps.
We have some expressions, don’t we, verbal pronouncements and declarations that sneak into our mental lexicon and unexpectedly foist themselves onto situations at inopportune times. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. Pull yourself together. Grow up. It sounds mature to tell someone to grow up. Authoritative. Very direct. But what may seem like sage and unflinching advice is a bit useless, really. Imagine you were walking along and you overheard a large tree look down and tell a small sapling to get its act together and grow faster. The advice does not change the sapling’s reality. The tree is misunderstanding its own physical size and age for wisdom and stature. But its attitude and behavior make it appear smaller. Because it should know better.
We should work on ways to know better.
Once, when he was young, my nephew tried to avoid doing something that his mom had asked him to do. I don’t recall the specific something; it was probably a something that was more new than difficult, a something that made him feel hesitant, inexperienced. And so he paused, looked about, and then stammered this reply: “I can’t do that. I’m not big.”
What a great expression of personal insecurity! I’m not big. The phrase has stuck with me through the years. I’ve occasionally used it in different settings, even at work, to either share my own uncertainty about a problem (“I’m not feeling too big about this right now”) or to motivate a group with a message that, together, we can accomplish a challenging task (“if we are big, we can do this”). Whenever I’ve borrowed my nephew’s line, I’ve tried to give him attribution. It’s helped diffuse tension for others to know that the original phrase came from a six year-old. It also has gotten some smiles of acknowledgment, recognition. People know the uncertainty of not feeling big.
I should have connected with the feeling myself the other day. “It’s time to grow up” – what a counterproductive and disheartening thing to say. Instead of building on a common human feeling of frailty and self-doubt, I resorted to the assertive and self-assured stance of power, dominance. I gave a mandate rather than offering a soft guidance. I acted like a tree that didn’t deserve to have anyone or anything enjoy its shade.
I wish it was easier to know better. Life experience does give us insights, it’s true. Unfortunately, experience does not give us perfect perspective or the right to treat another person with disrespect. It’s humbling to realize how imperfect my own view is into so many aspects of life and living. I am learning though – gradually – to spot my imperfections, and to do so more quickly than before. Seeing my weaknesses can hopefully help me better understand them. Such understanding can perhaps bolster my confidence to learn to change them.
I can still learn to be big. But first I must acknowledge how little I sometimes act.