Coming-Of-Age

The beautiful and natural process of a baby taking birth can be termed as magical or miraculous. A child is born and raised by the mother and in that process, the child learns to speak his/her mother tongue. He/she learns and imitates the surrounding people. After some years, his parents keep him in a playschool and ultimately in a school. The process of going to a school and learning something creates an impact on the child’s mind. Throughout his childhood, he keeps on learning and imbibing thoughts that his parents and teachers have taught him.

After some years, a child transforms into an adolescent and undergoes body as well as hormonal transformations. He starts developing feeling for the opposite sex or preferably even his own sex. This is the age which makes the teen most vulnerable, the age of 12-16 years. We also see the teen distancing himself from his parents at this age. This is because he favors his friends at this age. Thus, he needs a parent to be a friend at this age. He wants his parents to see the world from his perspective.

Finally after teenage, the child grows in an adult i.e. the transformation of a boy into a young man, of a girl into a young woman. 18 is the age at which he officially becomes an adult, young and capable of making his own decisions. He can decide to pursue his own career in the field of his liking and has the right to live his own life. He finally becomes mature.

After few years, he enters into his twenties and earns his first salary. This is the stepping stone into the real world. This is where he gets acquainted to the hardships of life and the difficulty of earning a living (and here I am talking about middle class families and not rich people who more often than not thrive on their dads’ money).

After another few years, he decides to marry the love of his life (his childhood sweetheart or a long-time girlfriend) and the so-called “settling-phase” occurs. (I assume he has good enough salary and everything’s fine by then). This the phase where he will have to balance his time between his parents and the love of his life.

After another few years, he collectively makes decisions with his life partner about family planning. He feels that they both are up for the responsibility.

After bringing up and raising his children, he becomes a parent and ultimately a grandparent. He enters into his 50s and in the twilight of his career he decides to retire and live the rest of his life in peace and away from the worldly pleasures. He gives up many things for peace and ultimately he dies.

Throughout the process of growing up and right until we die, we live with regrets. When we came into college we longed for our school days and when we were in our school days, we wanted to become older and lead a life without rules. After passing our college, we would once again long for our college days and how it used to be fun. And finally in our old age, we regret if we got more time in our young age or if we actually enjoyed our lives rather than just concentrating on making money and trying to secure our future. In the process of securing our future, we wasted our precious little time in the present and when we realized this, we became old enough living the last few days of our lives.

This is the nature of the human mind, the nature of human-beings. We live with regrets. “Don’t let your past haunt your present to ruin a beautiful future.” We even regret about choosing a different career or a different field. We think that if we had chosen a different path that day, life would have been completely different and even better. But unfortunately, we only have one chance to make a choice. We can’t choose two paths simultaneously. Besides we depress ourselves about the things that we lost in our lives in the past instead of moving on.

The foundation of this human life depends on how we live in the present and not how we regret the past or future. Besides who knows that in trying to secure our future, we lost track of our time and died prematurely?