Maturity beckons also, asking us to be larger, more fluid, more elemental, less cornered, less unilateral; a living, conversational intuition between the inherited story, the one we are privileged to inhabit, and the one - if we are large enough and broad enough, moveable enough and, even, here enough - just, astonishingly, about to occur.

Maturity calls us to risk ourselves as much as we did in our immaturity, but for a bigger picture, a larger horizon; for a powerfully generous outward incarnation of our inward qualities and not for gains that make us smaller, even in the winning.

Maturity is the discipline of giving up and giving away, to see what is left and what is real.

Real maturity can only be sustained by real silence, by a daily discipline of silence and an inhabitation of spaciousness, a foundational giving away.

Maturity is the breakdown of elemental frontiers, between different epochs of our life, between life and death, between the part of us that has been a fine, upstanding citizen and the darker, helpless parts of us that have caused harm and damage.

Maturity is the time when these tidal forces meet and break apart our life, making one life out of our regrets, our self-compassion, and our forgiveness forged into a future made real by a radical change in our behaviour.

Maturity is not a static arrived platform, a golden epoch from where life is viewed from a calm, untouched oasis of wisdom, but the dissolution of living elemental frontiers between what has happened, what is happening now, and the consequences of our passt; first imagined anew, and then lived into the waiting future.

The wisdom that comes from maturity is recognised through a disciplined refusal to choose between or isolate three powerful dynamics that form human identity: what has happened, what only looks as if it is happening now, and what is about to occur.

To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world; of weakness, a sign of fear rather than strength, and betrays a strange misunderstanding of an abiding, foundational and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.

Therefore, at any time of life, follow your own questions; don’t mistake other people’s questions for your own.