Today my daughter turned 18. It seems like just yesterday, tiny fingers gripped my finger and all the rest of the universe melted away. Just yesterday my daughter was strapped into a car seat in the back as we endlessly listened to those CD lullabies that made it hard to drive after 10 minutes.
As a matter of days in the spin of the Earth, today at 18 is no different than yesterday at 17. But it’s a psychological milestone. At 18 we vault into adulthood. We carve new paths as we leave a school structure that was cocoon. We experience the world as opportunity in front of us. The paths are well beyond Frost’s two roads diverging in a wood; they are an explosion of atoms of ideas that flit and collide and transform into new horizons of new ideas on the turns of dimes.
The miracle of youth is the character of optimism not regret….the ability to look forward not back…the resiliency to bounce back from setback…the plasticity of brains that can grasp ideas, connect dots, and design a new design of things on whim of imagination. Ideas sponges. Unconstrained synaptics firing on all cylinders.
Such energy – when they aren’t so confounding in their draping of loose gathering of appendages on your couch watching the Bachelorette endlessly, or raiding your pantry to leave only one cookie in the box for the late night adult snacker to discover. Kids are a perfect reflection of the beautiful master-stroke of divine brilliance that made us so adaptable.
Or more facetiously, our little Minnie-me’s are instrumental in helping us explain how our smartphone works.
I once observed on Facebook that the price of age is the diminishing of possibilities. Perhaps it was a down day – the product of another day as a warrior in the ring fighting for belief and values and ideas.
Someone took issue with my observation, and rightly so. It’s so easy, exhausted from the fight, to want to insulate from the world. To hide. To be pleased to make Candy Crush level 182 and hope the world’s despairs wash over us un-observed in the mean-time. We may call a friend for therapy. Too many these days find comfort in more dangerous substances. Too many of us simply feel pressured and defeated by a world that has a way of hurling its hurts and injustices at us like rain drops in the storm. To hide and dis-engage is a coping mechanism for that feeling of being overwhelmed (oddly the more pleasurable “whelmed” isn’t in the dictionary…maybe the dictionary has insight into the soul of us). This is the dynamic of the silent majority these days, wanting great things to happen but hoping someone else will do the heavy lifting.
Even more destructive to the epiphany of new things at the heart of great progress is the price we pay for anger, defeat, and the conflict of opinion in our life journey: rigidity. Yeh-buts. Sticks in mud. Aversion to change. More hard-edged in our minds, ever more firm in the belief that we know everything because of the experience that has greyed our hair at the temples. With each breath, building armour around our scars and ourselves. This is the dynamic of the small group (20% for sake of argument) of the angry who dominate 80% of our mindshare these days in decision making in all facets of society.
To be fair to my Facebook observation, in corporate or government world I encounter the defeat in people and culture cycling through the motions of things. Another plan here. Another check box there. Checked out of finding the deeper meaning in things to be found in problem solving and service to humanity. Angry and scrapping about the 99.9% of stuff that doesn’t matter while failing to address the deeper heart of the .01% that really does matter. In our defeat we become superficial. Culture eats itself for breakfast. By lunch culture is a petri dish of non-constructive pathogens.
What we really need to generate a breakthrough in the performance of humanity is to stoke the consciousness of the silent majority into…ACTION.
When I am having one of my self-focused, self-absorbed, woe-is-me fits of frustration, I look at my daughter. I find myself staring – into a soul of a spirit that youth represents. And what that spirit wants from us. My mind wanders to places where love is all that matters. If love is all that matters, we are blind to the artificial walls of the mind that divide us, constraining the limits of our individual and collective imagination.
When I look at my daughter, I’m reminded of the shiny naivete and optimism that helps us find new ways forward as a society. We could accelerate new ways forward if we clung to this spirit as our motivational, indefatigable heartbeat. We should fight the good fight not for us but for them – the generations that follow who have no responsibility for what lies in front of our eyes now. We should fight the good fight emboldened by simplicity of core values: whether our actions work toward improved conditions for the lot of us.
If we could just carry the torch of our youthful self as eternal flame, look out for the manifestation of the light that guides our way and helps us navigate the potholes that want to swallow us hole.
My daughter turned 18 today. The gift she has given me today is: perspective. And in perspective there is lullaby for the soul.