Growing up...

Someone told me a while ago that being an adult was about making hard decisions. Even though one can never be 100% sure of whether those decisions are right or not... But can you really make peace with a hard decision even when you are not 100% sure of it? It surely does sound hard to grow up when you are faced with a scary thought like this and yet nobody has figured out how to stop time; how to stop social demands from growing as you grow older; how to stop your dreams and concerns from piling up with time. 

So if adulthood is directly linked to a hard decision, I couldn't help myself but wonder what a hard decision really looks like. How hard does it have to be so that it can be categorized as a "hard decision"? Maybe what defines a difficult decision is the very fact that you cannot be 100% sure that you made the right decision when you face yourself with one of them. Maybe the fact that you have to face such intricate challenges means precisely that life is now complex enough to be considered "adulthood". Maybe we cannot really change and evolve if we never come across such hardcore paradoxes that come by every once in a while.

As the environment around us gets more complex and intricate with time we are drawn towards the big "hard" decisions. I've been through a couple of them myself already and I've observed that indeed the hardest paradoxes are those that still make you question your decision making abilities even way after the issues are behind you time wise. But I don't know if one can consider him- or herself and adult simply due to the fact that they are being faced with a difficult challenge in their lives. 

I would rather believe that true "adulthood" is really the end result of the entire process of addressing a hard decision. It is only after we face the big questions and then come out in the other end of the tunnel that we truly reached adulthood. I say this because many people get scared when faced with a hard situation that requires them to choose the "right" path to keep going. Therefore this group never really crosses the tunnel, they would actually rather ignore the intricate monster knocking at their doors. They are "pretenders" and their most beloved reaction is to play pretending. Like pretending they are blind and really can't see the hard decision in front of them. Or they pretend the challenge is not as urgent as it really is, so they ultimately postpone their advance.

This is why I believe that you grow up, you evolve, you become the socially labeled "adult", once you not only come across a hard decision, but you face it head on and you come out on the other end ready for the next one. You might still be scared, you might still question your approach and final decision, but you did not run away from a difficult challenge. And that is what allows a person to grow up and mature as a living being.