This Is How Your Responsibility Determines Your Maturity.
Maturity means sincerity, not seriousness.
“The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That’s the day we truly grow up.” ― John C. Maxwell
Are you a matured person or a serious person?
Society has turned most people into being serious rather than being mature. And this is because those who are serious only live by the rules.
The number one factor that determines whether you are a serious person or a matured person is the responsibility you are willing to take.
Are they your responsibility or responsibility handed to you.
You want to be an artist, but societal pressure makes you go to school, finish with good grades and get a high paying job. You do that for years till you retire only to find out that your life doesn’t have any meaning.
You find out your mates are getting married at a particular time, you decide to do the same without learning what marriage entails. Two years later, your marriage crashed.
These are responsibilities that were handed down to you indirectly.
The first was as a result of societal pressure. The second was as a result of peer pressure.
In a world that is always asking from us, we have resort to being serious rather than matured.
Understand that you can be a serious person without being matured. But you can’t be a matured person without being serious.
But what is maturity?
Zat Rana put it best when he said:
Maturity is about having developed the habit patterns that support your growth as a person in a complex world in your chosen direction.
It is the responsibility you are willing to take that moves you in the direction of your growth without any form of external pressure is what makes you matured.
Before you take any responsibility, ask yourself these questions:
Is this responsibility going to make me grow as a person?
Is this responsibility something in my chosen direction?
How does this responsibility benefit me in any way?
People get married when they aren’t ready and wonder why they don’t have a happy home.
People work for years at a job they don’t like and wonder why they aren’t moving forward on the spectrum of life.
People do what society gives them as a person and expect to be the richest man in the world.
Doing these only makes you serious not mature. And seriousness is no way to live if growth and challenge and truth is what you are after.
I saw a friend of mine recently who is planning for his wedding. Few minutes into our conversation, one can tell he isn’t ready for marriage. However, he must do it because of his family and peer pressure. On the surface, he might look like a serious person but looking at his decision deep down, you can sense it’s not something he chooses himself.
Seriousness by default is rigid and close-minded. This is because you try to convince yourself that you are doing the right thing and one thing with seriousness is that it dresses judgments up as a fact.
I’m married, so I’m on the right path of life.
I have a high paying job, why do anything else.
Seriousness is about trying to enforce your belief systems onto other people because you know best writes Zat Rana. Maturity, is about being open-minded because it uses personal preferences.
Age is just a number. Maturity is a choice.
Maturity never comes from age. It comes when we are able to learn from our bad and good experiences and implement those learnings in our further life. Finding a child more mature than an adult is not a thing to be amazed at. It is all about how much we learn from each and every incident, accident, event, etc. of our life.
Some aspects that may help you to get to know about yourself if you are mature or not?
When you do things not to prove your point but to acknowledge the right thing then you are mature.
When you attempt something not to win or lose, but to learn something, then you are mature.
When you learn that being silent is necessary at some places rather than proving yourself, then you are mature.
When you learn to share yourself in order to make others’ life comfortable, then you are mature.
Literally, something that’s “mature” is something that’s undergone a process of development.
Sincerity towards work is necessary in order to shape the future the way we want. But seriousness kills the child in us and grows us up before our natural growth.
A person’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The result of what we do is to grow. However, the real growth occurs when you grow in your own chosen direction and that comes when you learn to put maturity ahead of seriousness.
Maturity is about taking responsibility for things that make you grow in your chosen direction. Seriousness is about taking responsibility for things that are given to you but not in your chosen direction.
One has a personal preference, the other judges.
Strive for maturity and not seriousness.
