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  • The business of growing up is something we normally think comes to a close when we get

  • to 16 or soand finally turn into those fully finished products: adults. Up until

  • then, our growth is the subject of quite a lot of collective fascination. Twentieth-century

  • psychology, beginning with the work of the Swiss clinician Jean Piaget, pioneered an

  • approach to child development that meticulously identified and labelled every principal stage

  • an average infant might go through on the developmental journey of its earliest years.

  • Thanks to this work, we now know that at six months, a child will be able to sit up on

  • its own, pick up a small object (such as a raisin) using a thumb and forefinger and recognise

  • its own image in a mirror, though it will most likely take another three months before

  • it can drink from a cup on its own and understand simple requests. By two, it will start to

  • say 'I' and 'you' and it will probably be able to put on a hat by itself. Around

  • four, one can expect it to use sentences several words long and quite possibly invent an imaginary

  • friend (an achievement that belongs to what Piaget called the Symbolic Function Substage).

  • Between the ages of four and seven, children begin to grasp abstract concepts like 'time'

  • and 'a country' but typically make mistakes around the use of 'less than' and 'more

  • than'. Parents, uncles, aunts and grand-parents tend to be deeply interested in these developmental

  • milestoneswhich become the stuff of family legend. However, after about 16, the attention

  • society pays to the maturation of an individual becomes ever more coarsely grained. The focus

  • shifts to external, material matters: we track what someone gets in their university degree,

  • what job they secure and how they progress up the corporate hierarchy. Growing up becomes

  • synonymous with getting ahead. Yet, in truth, we never stop having opportunities to grow

  • in an emotionalrather than material or physical way. Perhaps between the ages of

  • 19 and 21, without anyone really focusing on this happening, we may radically rethink

  • our view of how to handle our parents' shortcomings. Or our view of envy takes a leap forward in

  • the middle of our 23rd year. Or, as we approach 33, lying in bed early one morning in a hotel,

  • we amend our sense of who is to blame in certain relationship difficulties. We may look more or

  • less the same, but inside, slow, unheralded moments of emotional growth can be going on.

  • Unfortunately, we have nothing like the clear, detailed stages to measure ourselves against

  • that babies and young children enjoyand that might give us the encouragement we would

  • need to note and foster stages of growth. Yet, every adult life contains the potential

  • to acquire new emotional skills, each in its own way as significant as a child mastering a

  • quirk of language (in English, for instance, saying 'I thought rather than I thinked')

  • or learning to ride a bicycle. To develop emotionally involves a range of steps: learning

  • to understand and sympathise with oneself; to take proper stock of one's childhood

  • influences; to communicate flaws and eccentricities to others in good time, to interpret others

  • beyond what they have directly said to us, to recognise the hard edges of reality without

  • being destroyed by them, to accept one's needs for consolation and assistance, to achieve

  • a necessary degree of confidence, to know how to despair without wholly giving up on

  • existenceWe can imagine plotting the inner journey like islands, each one of them marked

  • by settlements, which we should take the trouble systematically to work our way around, as

  • we might the cities of Renaissance Italy, or the beauty spots on the Pacific Highway.

  • We'd tell our friends excitedly that we'd learnt about Emotional Translation or had

  • achieved excellent grades in Communication. We might throw a party when we'd learnt

  • how to do Cheerful Despair. Despite misleading external signs, we aren't, in fact, ever

  • done with the tricky business of becoming that hugely important thing: an emotionally

  • mature person or, to put it another, simpler way, a real grown-up.

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The business of growing up is something we normally think comes to a close when we get

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如何繼續成長 (How To Keep Growing Up)

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    王凱莉 posted on 2021/01/14
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