As I write this, at 63 years old, I feel comfortable saying that I can see into the future.
No, I'm not telling you that I'm psychic or anything like that. I simply believe that I have a good sense of the future impact of things that I do. I would feel fine about taking actions, or avoiding actions, knowing that the likeliest outcomes of them would be positive, negative or whatever.
Now, that has nothing to do with me, per se, but with my age.
Think of it this way: a three-year-old does nothing but try things all day. He has very little idea of what will happen afterwards and can visualize almost nothing that may result if, say, he jumps up and down on the bed, or runs with scissors, or tries to fly out the window. He has essentially experienced nothing.
The capacity to anticipate the consequences of your actions expands as you get older. A ten-year-old might be able to figure what will happen a few hours or a day after he does something; a high school student maybe a week. Anything past that is beyond his event horizon and he is not so much prepared regardless of what happens then, but oblivious and unconcerned.
By 30, of course, humans have matured to the point of being able to make decisions that will have ramifications a year out, and it goes up from there. I can't tell you that I know what will happen ten years from now, but I can visualize alternatives and likely outcomes.
I believe that there is a tangible way to look at this, and for that I use the metaphor of cubbyholes.
A long time ago, when I first started thinking about what "maturity" really meant, I considered things like sanity, like dealing with others, like values. However, that seemed too vaporous a concept, and I needed something better.
Eventually I realized that the whole concept of "visualizing consequences" was core to defining maturity, and that the key was determining what gave us the ability to foresee those consequences. It's actually pretty simple once you think about it. We are able to foresee more likely outcomes as we get older, because we have seen the triggering actions before and remember what happened thereafter.
So think of a human's mind as an ever-increasing set of cubbyholes into which actions and outcomes, paired together, reside. Every time we observe an action and reaction or consequence, and connect the two by cause and effect, our brain creates a new, referenceable cubbyhole with the relationship in it. By the time you get to be, say, 40, you have seen a lot of things and have thousands of cubbyholes in that dusty old brain of yours -- and the number keeps expanding.
Eventually I have come to realize that what we call "maturity" is simply, stated another way, "counting cubbyholes". The Founding Fathers didn't stick that age-35 minimum to be President in the Constitution for nothing; they knew instinctively that you needed a brain stuffed with more than 35 years of cubbyholes to be able to handle everything that came at you, the more the better.
We reach into one of those cubbyholes (and chuckle) when our little children make an excuse that we ourselves made many years ago. Something in one of those cubbyholes tells us that a doctor in Nigeria is not actually ready to send us $1 million if we'll just give him our bank account number. Another tells us that no, Sports Illustrated is not serious when they say their swimsuit issue is actually "sports." And another told us that Obamacare was not a really good idea -- well, the Democrats in Congress had that cubbyhole, too; they just ignored it.
Of course, one of the cubbyholes is a special one, and that's the one that understands what I just wrote. We've possibly heard the story of how an aide to an early 20th Century French president, Clemençeau if I recall correctly, burst into his office to tell the president that his son had joined the Communist Party. Clemençeau replied calmly, "If he had not joined the Communists by the time he was 20, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will disown him then."
Get it? That special cubbyhole is the one where you discover that you don't know everything, and that pretty much everything you've thought of as a great idea has been thought of 166,754 times before (and mostly failed). When you get that cubbyhole, your parents suddenly get a whole lot smarter than they used to be.
And you realize that what you're learning as you get older is a whole bunch of "if-then" relationships that make us wise ... and mature.
Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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