Maturity

In the last few days, I've had the rare and remarkable opportunities to speak at length with collections of friends that I don't often see together.

The question was posed:

How would you define 'maturity'?

(This from the same guy who asked me how I would define aging, and to both his own reply was 'I'll let you know when I get there!')
(My eventual response: The process of becoming inflexible)

That night, my friends and I were speaking on an unrelated topic (It may have been about how one begins to establish mental categorizations for things [be it consonants or religions or humans], since that seemed to be the theme and variation for many of our discussions) that led to a discussion of how a person's perception of identity develops.

We remarked that from our experience, it seems that a person's early years are very influenced by their environment and molded by the kinds of people around them. As a person gets older, has more agency, and begins to wonder more about his or her identity, it is at first a more passive sort of wondering. The question Who am I, and who am I becoming? takes the attitude of a person watching and discovering who it is that the many outside forces acting upon their basic clay are making them into.

Continuing, a person may realize that they have an idea of the kind of person he or she wants to be and may perceive his or her identity as less of a lottery and more of a project. From here, the person may resist certain external events and pressures in favor of an internally-driven identity sculpting.

Independently, a friend and I realized that this might directly relate to the question posed to us earlier.

What is Maturity?

I think we agreed on the concept, so I will use my wording at the time:

the ability to mold oneself

And, by 'ability', I mean both the capability and the skill.