Many of us have memorable school pictures. Snaggle-toothed grins of elementary captured & available in 3×5 or 8×11. Spiffy “church clothes” moments in time that fit in your loved ones’ wallets.
Maybe yours is embarrassing. I had bangs in 6th grade. And braces. Here’s NOT that…
Do you remember being a kid? Before you learned all these crazy things about life, and people and all the institutions, thoughts, and fights they engage in.
Do you remember life before you cared about who got married, rather, were told to care about that?
What about… before you had your heart broken? before yoh felt your first disappointment? before you were let down? before…
…you “grew up” or, as I’ve started calling it: BECAME ADULTURATED.
“Adulturated” – the process of becoming an adult.
We all undergo Socialization: the activity of mixing socially with others; the process of learning to behave in a way that is acceptable to society.
It started as soon as you were born. It happened to all of us as we went through life through experience or advisement (there is a Biological imperative of living organisms to perpetuate their existence, aka: to survive).
We learn to exist on our own more and more until we become autonomous and able to care for ourselves. We come to think of the patterns, lessons, positions, thoughts we have as good and right. And anything contradictory or even merely different is wrong, threatening to our very existence. Well… at least that’s what our brains would have us believe.
And it gets intensified as we grow up, because the patterns have been so reinforced.
But we’re all just kids who got big. Things happened along the way that nudged and shaped and influenced who we are in every present moment – the process has happened from birth, and goes right up to every “right now” until there are no more “right now”s.
This is a play on the word “adulterate” which means (and this is not verbatim) to add something to another thing, spoiling its purety… now, think about that first time you had an eye-opening experience that erased some of your child-like naïvety… yeah.