From Essays After Montaigne
To send men to their place of sojourning before they be five and fiftie or three score yeares of age, me seemeth carrieth no great apparance with it. My advice would be, that our vacation and employment should be extended as I far as might be for the publike commoditie; but I blame some, and condemne most, that we begin not soone enough to employ our selves... As for my part, I thinke our minds are as full growne and perfectly joynted at twentie yeares as they should be, and promise as much as they can. A mind which at that age hath not given some evident token or earnest of her sufficiencie, shall hardly give it afterward, put her to what triall you list. Natural qualities and vertues, if they have any vigorous or beauteous thing in them, will produce and shew the same within that time, or ever.
How has our perception of age changed as life expectancy has increased dramatically? For one thing, we're becoming ever more distinct about defining age groups. Not that long ago, there were only babies, children, adults, and the elderly. Now we also have toddlers, tweens, teenagers, young adults, and so on. And these categories are more than convenient groupings by age. They represent identifiable developmental stages, each with its own issues, challenges, and needs. Concurrent with our increased life span, there has been a significant increase in the knowledge and skills that we're expected to master, so the threshold of maturity continues to creep upward, allowing a greater range within which to establish additional stages of development.
Montaigne believed a person to be fully formed by the time they were twenty. I'm not even sure that I should have been allowed to drive at that age, and I don't expect to be fully formed in Montagine's sense until I'm at least forty. I picked up a great deal of technical and other knowledge between the ages of ten and twenty-five, but I'm pretty sure I didn't mature any during the period. Yet since then, I've become an entirely new person, and that process is ongoing. At twenty-five, I knew little of and had little interest in what have become some of my greatest passions: reading, soccer, software development, and so much else. When I think back to who I was as a teenager and in my early twenties, and to what I did then, I suffer spasms of not wanting to have been that person that are so strong my therapist refers to them as suicidal images.
In those years between our ever more precisely defined childhood and our ever retreating adulthood, there is probably no realm in which we inflict greater harm on others and upon which we're less comfortable to look back than that of love and sex. When I remember the humiliations to which I subjected myself out of simple emotional ineptitude, I'm horrified. But when I think of the pain I caused others by pursuing relationships despite being so emotionally retarded, cowardly, and unavailable, my mortification is colored with real guilt. We require that youngsters be licensed before allowing them to drive. Might there not be some sense in somehow certifying them before allowing them to engage in love and sex? So at this late date, I can do nothing but offer my abject apologies to Bekki, Heidi, Penny, Maureen, Liz, and anyone else I may have hurt. In this season of atonement, I feel the desire for forgiveness.
7:25:29 AM 
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