What Is Maturity?

MATURITY is the growing awareness that you are neither wonderful nor hopeless. It has been said to be the making of peace between what is and what might be. It isn't a destination. It is a road. It is the moment when you wake up after some grief or staggering blow and think, "I'm going to live after all." It is the moment when you find out something you have long believed in isn't so and, parting with the old conviction, find that you're still you; the moment you discover somebody can do your job as well as you can, and you go on doing it anyway; the moment you do the thing you've always been afraid of; the moment you realize you are forever alone, but so is everybody else, and so in some way you are more together than ever; and a hundred other moments when you find out who you are. It is letting life happen in its own good order and making the most of what there is.