On adulthood

Our world is often too eager to place children on a high pedestal. These small, stumbling bundles of budding life, we poetically muse, are brilliant beacons of pristine innocence in a gloomy universe, inhabited by wearied adults brutally aged by the hostile vicissitudes of life, by people who helplessly carry weathered hearts in their sunken chests, those blood-pumping organs with their wearied ventricles and atria of labyrinthine recesses of dusty memories, those chambers of emotions that are so full of sorrowful vagaries.

Children hearken back to our most primal state of existence, we like to say, to our most unsullied human condition of purity; children are little universes of innocence in themselves, and we are refugees desperate to escape, even if only temporarily, from the worldly woes that betide us so naggingly. Children are thus widely celebrated -- oh, those untainted tabulae rasae, may they bloom eternally in such endearing guilelessness, though sadly one day they shall too be unlovable adults, irreparably contaminated by germs of artificial socialisation, and they shall too regrettably surrender their sweetness.

But there is really nothing intrinsically precious about being completely blank slates. If anything, I think adults are doubtless more deserving of our steadfast love, protection and (scientific) interest, because their arrival in our lives is frequently messily packaged with multiple facets -- numerous qualities that make them hideously ugly or astoundingly wonderful; that sculpt them into fascinating embodiments of striking ambivalence; that truly require our patient navigation, tireless exploration and, sometimes, loving understanding. Adults have scars left behind by past injuries and countless love-bites; they have unique stories of regret and tales of pride; they have personal baggages and different epiphanies. An adult's life becomes a beautifully chaotic palimpsest as he gains more life experiences that influence his perspectives, as he gets deeply damaged and then eventually healed again -- he transforms, sometimes magically, into a yellowed manuscript on which the shifting sands and unstoppable tides of time have penned their lovely poetry.

When two adults serendipitously meet and fall in love, they diligently attempt to merge the incomplete verses they have respectively heretofore authored, in the laudable hope of penning an unforgettable story together -- in the happiest scenario, they are able to jointly produce a masterful work of artistic perfection by nicely adjusting to each other's various stylistic and content-related demands, and a timeless composition is triumphantly finished; in a less joyous case, they bid farewell due to irreconcilable differences, and gradually saunter on -- perhaps with some visible traces of this brief romantic encounter indelibly engraved on their individual slates, perhaps with obvious signs of erasure to remove all trails of the other person's sojourn in their lives -- as they seek to properly honour their lives with careful introspections, born either of their own solitary ruminations or of collaborative partnership with new visitors in their lives, who might finally, fortunately turn out to be the ones they've endlessly sought.

We tumble and flounder and blunder along the bumpy route to adulthood, and on our deathbeds we quietly whisper au revoir as we inevitably dissolve, as grey specks of ashes, into the magnanimous embrace of the smiling cosmos, blissfully dying with much more capacity to love, to hate and to be indifferent than we could ever genuinely possess as children.