On Adulthood

What is the surest sign of one reaching adulthood? Is it the range of physiological changes that a boy undergoes during his transition to a man? Or is it the attainment of big academic qualifications of graduation or post graduation? In my opinion, it is the lifting of the curtains of ‘fairness’ and the exposure to the ‘unfair’ world.

Throughout the pre-adulthood stage of the life, one is taught that one should confine oneself to the right, to the fair, to the just. And as long as one remains confined to the ‘straight and narrow’, one will never come to grief. Of course, even in the pre-adulthood days, one is often encountered with the striking arm of justice. However, more often than not, in such cases, one knows that one had veered off the ‘straight and narrow’, and one accepts the consequences with a sense of justice, if not equanimity.

However, the big bad adult world has no such ‘straight and narrow’. It’s all a big, fuzzy mess. It’s like growing up from the Newtonian determinism to the amorphous, jellylike world of quantum mechanical uncertainties. All the normal cause and effect relations taught in the ‘moral science’ lectures are contradicted. The reason is not hard to find. The world, and the Nature in itself, is simply amoral. There is a right thing to do, at one point of space, at one point of time, and in situation. Thus, there is no straight and narrow. If one is lucky, one at least has a narrow, which, though not straight, is contiguous and one is able to negotiate. Occasionally, however, there come situations where there is no ‘righteous path’ from the point one is currently situated. To come back to the path, one has to take a ‘quantum’ leap through the murky space, whose stink may cling on. So, in a sense, a breakdown of the simple moralistic world is what can be termed as an encounter with adulthood.
I had one such encounter on 10th February, when one of the very senior Bosses of mine castigated me for doing something which was right. May be it was just a flow of Nature – one is often asked to choose between the right and the difficult vs. the wrong and easy. The catch was that the right was easy for me but difficult for him. So maybe the whole tongue-lashing was an exercise in making the ‘difficulty’ bear upon me, thereby making my choice a moral one – between the right and the easy.