Age is just a number. I have heard many people say that. Well, numbers count and so does age. When I was a 10 year old kid, one of my fantasies lay in being able to drive cars. “Daddy can I drive a car now ?”, would be answered as “Sweetheart, you are not old enough." So, I would have another question which I always failed to ask out loud: “When do I grow up?"
For most of us, as kids, a significant amount of time was spent in wondering about our grown up selves. At some point we might have had thoughts of growing up and living on our own. The very idea had been centered on the ability to make one’s own decisions and not be shown directions. And it is wonderful that the transition from a kid to a grown up happens quite seamlessly. We seem to know when we are old enough to do something without even possessing an map to show the next big milestone.
Well, it seems that such a thing comes to people naturally, just as it happens naturally. In most cases we grow up because we need to. In Harper Lee’s book To Kill A Mocking Bird, the brother and sister duo were my favorite. The story grapples with incidents about how the kids grow with time. Jem and Scout protect their father, Atticus, a lawyer and his accused client Tom Robinson from a group of men by not leaving their dad alone in the middle of the night. They evinced fearless traits of adults, not because they were grown ups, but because the moment needed them to be.
Since there aren’t any markings to indicate actions by age, there remain a few exceptions. At the age of 10 and 12 years respectively, Shravan and Sanjay Kumaran of India became the youngest CEOs of their App development company in the year 2012. At this age, I was probably struggling with computer science at school like most kids. But these kids ran a company like 30 year olds. So, didn’t they know that they weren’t old enough? Or do we have wrong ideas about one being old enough to run a company and do a job? Again, do you remember judging people as a kid? But we do so when we grow up. What tells us that we are old enough to do that? What tells us that we are old enough to hold opinions about people based on their color or race, religion or sex, faith or work?
Actually, it seems that sometimes we never grow up. If we do, then there will be no violence, we will never abandon the shade of a tree, we will spend time with loved ones, we will sit back and appreciate life, we will thank God for what we have and not complain about what we don’t, we will try to earn respect more than money, we will respect every kind of work, we will understand that homosexuality is very normal, we will not hear phrases like “this is for girls and that is for boys,” we will love ourselves regardless of a not so perfect body and visage, we will love people for what they are, and we will fall in love with life because this is all we have.
Now, I am 18 years old and I am learning how to drive. But, I haven’t found an answer yet. I think I won’t, not until we all grow up together and certainly not until we realize that the moment needs us to.
