Becoming Them, Becoming Nothing

Witty Banter

Hi there! I know I have been causing a few delays in publishing these blogs but the reason is I am being pulled in all directions with work, and partly because I wanted to give this piece the time it deserves. I don’t know why I haven’t written about this earlier, it feels almost too close to me. This topic is simple on the surface: when we were young, older people seemed to embody everything, maturity, grace, certainty, and yet when we finally grow into their shoes, we find ourselves oddly underwhelmed, even disappointed. Why is that? Why does the very image we revered crumble when we inhabit it ourselves? That’s what I want to explore here, not just as an observation, but as a question that lingers at the core of how I see life. So let’s get into it.

The Mirage of Maturity and the Horizon That Never Was

When we are children, age is a towering cathedral. Its spires rise beyond our reach, its bells toll with authority, its arches bend with elegance and permanence. We look up at the elders, parents, teachers, uncles, strangers with lined foreheads and slow, deliberate gestures and we are certain that there lies completion. They appear as monuments to order, sentinels guarding the path into adulthood. And so we wait. We imagine that one day we too shall stand at that altar, clothed in the dignity of years, finally steady, finally arrived. But the day comes. The candles are lit, the calendar pages fall, and you cross the threshold into the very age you once wished to be of. And the cathedral vanishes. What you find instead is not a sanctuary but a wilderness. Doubts scurry in every corner, your hands tremble with the same uncertainties, your heart still falters with childish fears. You discover, almost cruelly, that maturity was never what you thought it was.

The Fracture of Arrival

Why does this disappointment sting so deeply? Because “arrival” was always a mirage. As a child, you thought age itself was a substance, that each passing year poured a little more wisdom into the vessel of the self. But the truth is stranger, age does not fill, it only strips away. It removes illusions one by one, until you stand exposed, realising that the elders you worshiped were never statues of certainty. They too were wanderers, draped in costumes of confidence, speaking with voices they themselves barely trusted. You mistook their silence for wisdom, their restraint for depth, their exhaustion for serenity. The glory of their maturity was not their possession, but your projection.

The Horizon and the Infinite Chase

Here lies the metaphysical trick of time, it always dangles completion ahead of us. Childhood dreams of adulthood. Adolescence longs for independence. Adults yearn for mastery. Elders wait for peace. Yet at every stage, the horizon pulls back. You never reach it. This is not accident, it is the architecture of becoming. Time ensures that the fully grown self remains always one step away, like a mirage in the desert. You chase, but you never drink. And so life is not a story of reaching, but of longing. The elders you envied were not complete, they were simply further into the longing.

The Masks of Existence

What if, then, there is no such thing as “maturity” at all? What if it is merely a mask, a performance we inherit as the years demand?

The child’s mask is awe.
The youth’s mask is rebellion.
The adult’s mask is composure.
The elder’s mask is wisdom.

But beneath the masks there is no fixed self, only the trembling current of consciousness. We are not beings who arrive.We are wanderers staging endless plays on the theatre of time, hoping the masks convince even ourselves. And perhaps this is why the disappointment hurts, the child within you recognises that the mask of “adult certainty” is thin, and the abyss behind it is wide.

The Abyss as Teacher

Yet in this abyss lies a strange gift. To realise that you will never match them, never arrive, never embody some mythical completion, is not failure, it is liberation. For what if the point was never to become a monument, but to live as a flame? A flame does not stand, it flickers. It does not endure unchanged, it burns through itself. It does not promise permanence, but it illuminates the moment. The elders you idolised were flames too. You saw them as statues because your child’s eyes could not yet perceive fire. But now you stand close enough to feel the heat and in it, you glimpse the truth: 

we are all unfinished, always unfinished.

Beyond the Myth of Becoming

If so, then perhaps maturity is not about gaining answers, but about carrying the weight of questions with more grace. Perhaps it is not a crown placed on the head, but an acceptance of the crown less state of being. And if we go further still into the metaphysical abyss, the disappointment you feel is not about failing to match your elders. It is about confronting the illusion of time itself. You thought life was a ladder: climb enough rungs, and you become whole. But life is not a ladder. It is a circle, or perhaps a spiral, turning endlessly around the same doubts, same hopes, same fears, only in different guises.

To grow old is not to ascend but to deepen, to recognise that the mystery does not resolve, it only thickens.

The Silent Consolation

So, why did older people once seem so radiant, so dignified? Because you projected your longing for permanence onto them. And why do you feel disappointment now? Because the veil has lifted, and you see that permanence was never there.

But do not grieve too much for the loss. For in that unveiling lies the secret: life was never about becoming something final. It was always about moving through the unfathomable, holding the chaos gently, burning as a flicker of light in the vast dark. And perhaps the true maturity the one no child can ever imagine, and no adult can ever own is simply this:

to stand in the abyss of incompletion and whisper, with quiet wonder, it is enough.