Guarantee Of Maturity Quotes

One thing is certain: the arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge, and, most of all, guarantee a future free from boredom. They allow growth and even demand it in that time of life we call maturity but too often enter it with a childish faith that what we learned in youth is sustenance enough for the years when most men are mentally famished but won't admit it—or when they are apt to curb their hunger with the sops of complacency, security, and the assurance of death.

One of our most serious challenges is that we mature sexually way before we do mentally. And what’s worse is that mental maturity is not even guaranteed.

Mr Blyth, you should remember one thing. A celibate island life fighting Turks is no particular guarantee of early maturity. Take a little crone-like advice, and don’t rush your judgements.

Time served does not guarantee maturity.

The sad truth is, we are all grown ups and most of us are matured. However, not all of us are old enough to accept that loving someone doesn't guarantee you that they will love you in return.

All knowledge that takes special training to acquire is the province of the Magician energy. Whether you are an apprentice training to become a master electrician and unraveling the mysteries of high voltage; or a medical student, grinding away night and day, studying the secrets of the human body and using available technologies to help your patients; or a would-be stockbroker or a student of high finance; or a trainee in one of the psychoanalytic schools, you are in exactly the same position as the apprentice shaman or witch doctor in tribal societies. You are spending large amounts of time, energy, and money in order to be initiated into rarefied realms of secret power. You are undergoing an ordeal testing your capacities to become a master of this power. And, as is true in all initiations, there is no guarantee of success. [Magician energy]

Ohhhhh." A lush-bodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty. In an ivory georgette-crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric. She's standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blond head is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties. White cotton! The ivory-crepe sundress is floating and filmy as magic. The dress is magic. Without the dress the girl would be female meat, raw and exposed. She's not thinking such a thought! Not her. She's an American girl healthy and clean as a Band-Aid. She's never had a soiled or a sulky thought. She's never had a melancholy thought. She's never had a savage thought. She's never had a desperate thought. She's never had an un-American thought. In the papery-thin sundress she's a nurse with tender hands. A nurse with luscious mouth. Sturdy thighs, bountiful breasts, tiny folds of baby fat at her armpits. She's laughing and squealing like a four year-old as another updraft lifts her skirt. Dimpled knees, a dancer's strong legs. This husky healthy girl. The shoulders, arms, breasts belong to a fully mature woman but the face is a girl's face. Shivering in New York City mid-summer as subway steam lifts her skirt like a lover's quickened breath. "Oh! Ohhhhh." It's nighttime in Manhattan, Lexington Avenue at 51st Street. Yet the white-white lights exude the heat of midday. The goddess of love has been standing like this, legs apart, in spike-heeled white sandals so steep and so tight they've permanently disfigured her smallest toes, for hours. She's been squealing and laughing, her mouth aches. There's a gathering pool of darkness at the back of her head like tarry water. Her scalp and her pubis burn from the morning's peroxide applications. The Girl with No Name. The glaring-white lights focus upon her, upon her alone, blond squealing, blond laughter, blond Venus, blond insomnia, blond smooth-shaven legs apart and blond hands fluttering in a futile effort to keep her skirt from lifting to reveal white cotton American-girl panties and the shadow, just the shadow, of the bleached crotch. "Ohhhhhh." Now she's hugging herself beneath her big bountiful breasts. Her eyelids fluttering. Between the legs, you can trust she's clean. She's not a dirty girl, nothing foreign or exotic. She's an American slash in the flesh. That emptiness. Guaranteed. She's been scooped out, drained clean, no scar tissue to interfere with your pleasure, and no odor. Especially no odor. The Girl with No Name, the girl with no memory. She has not lived long and she will not live long.

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As long as a believer is worrying about whether or not they are truly saved, they will never grow up in spiritual maturity. It basically guarantees that a Christian will remain stuck in spiritual infancy. And worse, it paints a picture of God that is not only untrue but also unbiblical. It cheapens the gift of salvation – the gift of grace – and make God look like a finicky human.

The following brief points are like magic moccasins. They guarantee safe guidance through the forest of people. To walk safely, wear them! 1. The most persuasive power you have toward others is a mature self. 2. The mark of greatness is to be superior without feeling superior. 3. "The consciousness of being loved softens the keenest pang." (Joseph Addison) 4. The turning point in all your exterior relations comes when you start changing your inner self. 5. Strong people attract the weak. 6. Possessiveness and dependency are not states of love. 7. Your own level of being attracts the kind of people who enter your life. 8. "He is happy as well as great who needs neither to obey nor command in order to be something." (Goethe) 9. Your True Self cannot be afraid of anyone. 10. You break the cord of painful thought toward another person by snipping the connection within your own mind. 11. It is very painful to pretend to be someone. 12. Any sincere effort at bettering your human relations returns a reward. 13. Don't drain your energy by thinking negatively toward people who harm you. 14. You get along with others to the exact degree that you get along with yourself. 15. A real person stands out like a human being among statues.

One of our deepest struggles in life is dealing with the unconscious anxiety inside of us that pressures us to try to give ourselves significance and immortality. There is always the inchoate gnawing: do something to guarantee that something of your life will last. It is this propensity that tempts us to try to find meaning and significance through success and accumulation. But in the end it does not work, irrespective of how great our successes have been.

Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.' " "Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert talks about this phenomenon in his 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. “The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real,” he writes. “The frontal lobe—the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age—is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens.” This time travel into the future—otherwise known as anticipation—accounts for a big chunk of the happiness gleaned from any event. As you look forward to something good that is about to happen, you experience some of the same joy you would in the moment. The major difference is that the joy can last much longer. Consider that ritual of opening presents on Christmas morning. The reality of it seldom takes more than an hour, but the anticipation of seeing the presents under the tree can stretch out the joy for weeks. One study by several Dutch researchers, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life in 2010, found that vacationers were happier than people who didn’t take holiday trips. That finding is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the timing of the happiness boost. It didn’t come after the vacations, with tourists bathing in their post-trip glow. It didn’t even come through that strongly during the trips, as the joy of travel mingled with the stress of travel: jet lag, stomach woes, and train conductors giving garbled instructions over the loudspeaker. The happiness boost came before the trips, stretching out for as much as two months beforehand as the holiday goers imagined their excursions. A vision of little umbrella-sporting drinks can create the happiness rush of a mini vacation even in the midst of a rainy commute. On some level, people instinctively know this. In one study that Gilbert writes about, people were told they’d won a free dinner at a fancy French restaurant. When asked when they’d like to schedule the dinner, most people didn’t want to head over right then. They wanted to wait, on average, over a week—to savor the anticipation of their fine fare and to optimize their pleasure. The experiencing self seldom encounters pure bliss, but the anticipating self never has to go to the bathroom in the middle of a favorite band’s concert and is never cold from too much air conditioning in that theater showing the sequel to a favorite flick. Planning a few anchor events for a weekend guarantees you pleasure because—even if all goes wrong in the moment—you still will have derived some pleasure from the anticipation. I love spontaneity and embrace it when it happens, but I cannot bank my pleasure solely on it. If you wait until Saturday morning to make your plans for the weekend, you will spend a chunk of your Saturday working on such plans, rather than anticipating your fun. Hitting the weekend without a plan means you may not get to do what you want. You’ll use up energy in negotiations with other family members. You’ll start late and the museum will close when you’ve only been there an hour. Your favorite restaurant will be booked up—and even if, miraculously, you score a table, think of how much more you would have enjoyed the last few days knowing that you’d be eating those seared scallops on Saturday night!

If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.

Although in childhood the girl-child may have discovered her clitoris as a source of pleasure, she will enter adolescence convinced that the vagina is her only sexual organ. The vagina becomes the focus of sexual pleasure in a world that reduces sensuality to genital intercourse defined by the needs and desires of men. As a result, the girl-child’s erotic potential will be confined to an activity that requires a partner. An activity that guarantees physical satisfaction for the man. An activity that in and of itself does not guarantee her satisfaction. The very same parents who are “grossed out” by the masturbation of their pre-teen daughters breathe a sigh of relief when those same daughters move away from the clitoris and turn toward the vagina. Groomed to sexually service men, she will forget about her body’s capacity for sensual delight and satisfaction. Her original love of her body, curiosity about its sensations, and exploration of its nooks and crannies is twisted out of shape and labeled unacceptable. The price tags successfully reversed; she becomes dependent on others to meet her erotic needs. Many of our daughters stop touching themselves by adolescence and at the same time lose the affectionate touch of their parents. As they mature and grow out of the "cute stage," adults become uncomfortable with their developing bodies and most touching abruptly stops. The girl-child tries to make sense of this withdrawal of affection. She becomes convinced that something is wrong with her body—that her growing breasts and pubic hair, and the genital sensations she is experiencing make her untouchable to her parents. For some, the incestuous behavior of a parent or relative compounds this growing discomfort.

How exactly the debt should be funded was to be the most inflammatory political issue. During the Revolution, many affluent citizens had invested in bonds, and many war veterans had been paid with IOUs that then plummeted in price under the confederation. In many cases, these upright patriots, either needing cash or convinced they would never be repaid, had sold their securities to speculators for as little as fifteen cents on the dollar. Under the influence of his funding scheme, with government repayment guaranteed, Hamilton expected these bonds to soar from their depressed levels and regain their full face value. This pleasing prospect, however, presented a political quandary. If the bonds appreciated, should speculators pocket the windfall? Or should the money go to the original holders—many of them brave soldiers—who had sold their depressed government paper years earlier? The answer to this perplexing question, Hamilton knew, would define the future character of American capital markets. Doubtless taking a deep breath, he wrote that “after the most mature reflection” about whether to reward original holders and punish current speculators, he had decided against this approach as “ruinous to public credit.”25 The problem was partly that such “discrimination” in favor of former debt holders was unworkable. The government would have to track them down, ascertain their sale prices, then trace all intermediate investors who had held the debt before it was bought by the current owners—an administrative nightmare. Hamilton could have left it at that, ducking the political issue and taking refuge in technical jargon. Instead, he shifted the terms of the debate. He said that the first holders were not simply noble victims, nor were the current buyers simply predatory speculators. The original investors had gotten cash when they wanted it and had shown little faith in the country’s future. Speculators, meanwhile, had hazarded their money and should be rewarded for the risk. In this manner, Hamilton stole the moral high ground from opponents and established the legal and moral basis for securities trading in America: the notion that securities are freely transferable and that buyers assume all rights to profit or loss in transactions. The knowledge that government could not interfere retroactively with a financial transaction was so vital, Hamilton thought, as to outweigh any short-term expediency. To establish the concept of the “security of transfer,” Hamilton was willing, if necessary, to reward mercenary scoundrels and penalize patriotic citizens. With this huge gamble, Hamilton laid the foundations for America’s future financial preeminence.

But Muslims now find themselves in a world shaped by western theories and western values. If we are to consider how Islamic communities conducted their affairs throughout the greater part of their history, it may be convenient to compare and contrast this way of life with the contemporary western model. Today the Muslims are urged to embrace democracy and are condemned for political corruption, while western scholars debate whether Islam can ever accommodate the democratic ideal. On the whole, they think not. Democracy, they believe, is a sign of political maturity and therefore of superiority. Western societies, since they are seen as democratic, exemplify this superiority. So there is one question that has to be pressed home: what, precisely, is meant by democracy? Let me put forward an imaginary Arab who knows nothing of western ways but would like to learn about them. He is aware that the literal meaning of the word democracy is "mob rule", but understands that this is not what westerners mean by it. He wonders how this meaning has, in practice, been modified and, since his questions are directed to an Englishman, he is not altogether surprised to be told that Britain is the exemplary democracy. He learns that the people—all except children, lunatics and peers of the realm—send their representatives to Parliament to speak for them. He is assured that these representatives never accept bribes to vote against their consciences or against the wishes of their constituents. He enquires further and is astonished to learn that the political parties employ what are known as Whips, who compel members to vote in accordance with the party line, even if this conflicts both with their consciences and with the views of the people who elected them. In this case it is not money but ambition for office that determines the way they vote. "But is this not corruption?" he asks naively. The Englishman is shocked. "But at least the party in power represents the vast majority of the electorate?" This time the Englishman is a little embarrassed. It is not quite like that. The governing party, which enjoys absolute power through its dominance in the House of Commons, represents only a minority of the electorate. "Are there no restraints on this power?" There used to be, he is told. In the past there was a balance between the Crown, the House of Lords and the Commons, but that was seen as an undemocratic system so it was gradually eroded. The "sovereignty" of the Lower House is now untrammelled (except, quite recently, by unelected officials in Brussels). "So this is what democracy means?" Our imaginary Arab is baffled. He investigates further and is told that, in the 1997 General Election, the British people spoke with one voice, loud and clear. A landslide victory gave the Leader of the Labour Party virtually dictatorial powers. Then he learns that the turn-out of electors was the lowest since the war. Even so, the Party received only forty-three per cent of the votes cast. He wonders if this can be the system which others wish to impose on his own country. He is aware that various freedoms, including freedom of the press, are essential components of a democratic society, but no one can tell him how these are to be guaranteed if the Ruler, supported by a supine—"disciplined"—House of Commons enjoys untrammelled authority. He knows a bit about rulers and the way in which they deal with dissent, and he suspects that human nature is much the same everywhere. Barriers to oppression soon fall when a political system eliminates all "checks and balances" and, however amiable the current Ruler may be, there is no certainty that his successors, inheriting all the tools of power, will be equally benign. He turns now to an American and learns, with some relief since he himself has experienced the oppression of absolutism, that the American system restrains the power of the President by that of the Congress and the Supreme Court; moreover, the electe

There are other problems more closely related to the question of culture. The poor fit between large scale and Korea’s familistic tendencies has probably been a net drag on efficiency. The culture has slowed the introduction of professional managers in situations where, in contrast to small-scale Chinese businesses, they are desperately needed. Further, the relatively low-trust character of Korean culture does not allow Korean chaebol to exploit the same economies of scale and scope in their network organization as do the Japanese keiretsu. That is, the chaebol resembles a traditional American conglomerate more than a keiretsu network: it is burdened with a headquarters staff and a centralized decision-making apparatus for the chaebol as a whole. In the early days of Korean industrialization, there may have been some economic rationale to horizontal expansion of the chaebol into unfamiliar lines of business, since this was a means of bringing modern management techniques to a traditional economy. But as the economy matured, the logic behind linking companies in unrelated businesses with no obvious synergies became increasingly questionable. The chaebol’s scale may have given them certain advantages in raising capital and in cross-subsidizing businesses, but one would have to ask whether this represented a net advantage to the Korean economy once the agency and other costs of a centralized organization were deducted from the balance. (In any event, the bulk of chaebol financing has come from the government at administered interest rates.) Chaebol linkages may actually serve to hold back the more competitive member companies by embroiling them in the affairs of slow-growing partners. For example, of all the varied members of the Samsung conglomerate, only Samsung Electronics is a truly powerful global player. Yet that company has been caught up for several years in the group-wide management reorganization that began with the passing of the conglomerate’s leadership from Samsung’s founder to his son in the late 1980s.72 A different class of problems lies in the political and social realms. Wealth is considerably more concentrated in Korea than in Taiwan, and the tensions caused by disparities in wealth are evident in the uneasy history of Korean labor relations. While aggregate growth in the two countries has been similar over the past four decades, the average Taiwanese worker has a higher standard of living than his Korean counterpart. Government officials were not oblivious to the Taiwanese example, and beginning in about 1981 they began to reverse somewhat their previous emphasis on large-scale companies by reducing their subsidies and redirecting them to small- and medium-sized businesses. By this time, however, large corporations had become so entrenched in their market sectors that they became very difficult to dislodge. The culture itself, which might have preferred small family businesses if left to its own devices, had begun to change in subtle ways; as in Japan, a glamour now attached to working in the large business sector, guaranteed it a continuing inflow of Korea’s best and brightest young people.73

When you put him down drowsy but awake and he cries hard, immediately pick him up for more soothing and try again some other time that day or the next day. If he makes very quiet sounds, wait and see. He might drift off to sleep or begin to cry hard. If he now begins to cry hard, quickly pick him up. Don’t be disappointed if he does not fall asleep when you first start to practice putting him down drowsy but awake; it just takes practice. Expect to become frustrated, because initially you may be successful only about 10 percent of the time during the first week. But by the end of the second week, you may be successful 20 percent of the time. This percentage may double each week, so after a few more weeks it becomes much easier. Be optimistic! After a few months of practice and the maturation of sleep rhythms, you will develop an anticipatory sense of when he will need to sleep. Later, when he is completely well rested, don’t be surprised if drowsy signs disappear altogether because you have successfully synchronized the timing of your soothing to sleep with the beginning of his emerging sleep wave. It’s like being good at surfing; you catch the wave for a long ride. Patience, practice, timing, and trial and error will guarantee success.

Umteto wesintu prescribes five amabanga okuphila (phases of becoming) as the stages by which to attain ubuntu. These are birth or the introduction of experience, growth or opening up and outward; and the adaptation to the demands of growth, maturity, or the highest point of achievement. Then there is the decline, the winding down of experience and death of the conclusion of experience for the person. Each phase is the moment of living out a principle; babyhood expresses the excellence which inheres in the person. During infancy the child grows; opening outward characterises his personality; he needs all the latitude he can have to learn and grow and develop his personality. At the height of his power he identifies himself with his neighbor to project society into the future or to guarantee its survival. Decline is important, too, because it enables the person to reassess his life and to give it meaning; he opens himself to all experience and to all persons; he responds to the call of mutuality. Death ferries him to the world of spirit-forms and death in the latter is rebirth into the physical world. The person, like all creation, is always moving between 'death' and 'birth' and vice versa. The cycle has no beginning and no end; it can neither be caused nor terminated because the person is a cell of the infinite consciousness. Ubuntu denies that the person owes his existence to any power outside of himself. The consciousness does not create him; he is its constituent organ. Since an infinity is by definition a unity, the consciousness cannot be other than whole; nothing can be taken away from it and nothing can be added to it; it cannot be whole if the person is taken out of it; it needs him as much in order to be a whole as he needs it to survive. It is this element of mutuality which binds the consciousness and the person and which keeps the cosmic order a unity and gives rise to the mutuality principle. . . . God is the cell of the consciousness infinitised, while the human being is God personalised.

The loss for all adults who remain loyal to ungiving parents is the loss of time. Living with the attitudes and identity of a child in an adult body is a guaranteed way of wasting time that could be used toward developing a more mature and satisfying way of life. The lost time is simply that—lost—and every passing year reduces the probability that the adult child who remains attached to failed parents will be able to emerge into adulthood.

don’t get caught up with the chemistry alone. A charming woman can create chemistry with you in a heartbeat, but that doesn’t guarantee that she’s relationship material. What you really want to observe is whether or not she’s emotionally mature. The

Age is no guarantee of maturity.

Many successful people in the world are hard-hearted and self-centered. We see that behavior far too often. When you know Jesus, He guarantees eternal life for you. But if you really know and obey Him, you will serve a higher purpose than yourself and will treat others with love and compassion.

It is characteristic of the person who is emotionally in health that he can ‘make do’ with fewer guarantees than can the emotionally disturbed person. . . . He does not need, therefore, what amounts to a guarantee that his truth is the truth or is all truth, or that his actions will inevitably be crowned with success. Since he experiences, by and large, an inner state of happiness and freedom, he can take it more or less for granted that he has somehow got hold of enough truth to go on for the time being — and that more is likely to come when he has gone far enough to need and find it.” —The Mind Alive One of the places that mature courage is most needed is in exercising the capacity to move forward on faith. The Overstreets argue that the mature mind is one that is comfortable acting on a “faith in life,” which they describe as the psychological “permission” that allows the emotionally healthy man “to go on from where he is,” “to go further into experience than he has ever yet gone,” “to go beyond the known into the not yet known, beyond the tried into the not yet tried.” Part of the kind of black and white thinking that marks the adolescent mind is the desire to possess absolute knowledge before committing to an idea or path. To have all the answers before moving forward or throwing one’s hat in the ring. The mature person has a higher tolerance for mystery and uncertainty; he doesn’t have to have everything figured out in order to take a step into the darkness. This ability to grapple with the unknown, the Overstreets argue, grows out of the mature individual’s substantial, varied experiences with diving deep into life.

Cares for Something/Someone Outside the Self “It is the capacity to care — to care intensely about something beyond the limited self — that we seem to find our best clue to what mature individuality is.” —The Mind Alive The Overstreets convincingly argue that, for several reasons, the capacity to deeply care for someone or something forms the very core of the mature mind. First, it slays adolescent ego-absorption by shifting an individual’s focus outside the self, and training that focus on something bigger than the self. Second, it requires the “emotional overflow” of well-developed inner resources, particularly the development of courage, as sincerely caring is underrated as a truly frightening endeavor: “Caring — whether for another person, a line of work, a field of knowledge, or a conviction — is, in a sense, the most hazardous of human experiences. The emotionally impoverished person cannot afford it; for it means choosing to be vulnerable. . . . There is, in psychological truth, a certain terror that is part of the experience of deep caring: the terror of letting one’s self go; putting one’s whole capacity to feel and suffer at the disposal of something beyond the self. No one, it seems safe to assume, who has ever deeply and genuinely loved another human being or a chosen vocation or a social cause or a religious faith has ever wholly escaped this terror.” Third, it is the only way to catalyze one’s full potential: “If the risks of caring are great, so are the rewards; for it is one of the basic facts of human life that the ungiven self is the unfulfilled self. Only the individual who builds a strong, sound relationship with his world can himself become strong, sound, and resourceful: ready for what happens; able to be affirmative and creative in his dealings with experience.” Caring is such a key element of human fulfillment, in part because it provides a non-duplicable source of motivation:   “If a person never greatly cares about anything beyond himself, he has little spontaneous reason to get over the hump of inertia and submit himself to the discipline of a working material or a body of knowledge. . . . an individual’s area of caring and the strength of his caring determine the inconveniences he will willingly suffer and the risks he will run.” Finally, the practice of caring for things outside the self — a process in which the arrows of influence and need work both ways — disabuses you of delusional notions of complete autonomy and control (ideals maturity approaches, but can never completely attain, nor would find desirable to attain); it serves as a visceral, humbling reminder of where you remain (wonderfully) dependent. In caring for some person or idea, you come to an understanding of humanity’s interconnectedness, a “sense of how things hang together; not just the thing itself, but the meaning of it.” As the Overstreets conclude, “the capacity to care — to enjoy richly, love deeply, feel strongly, and if need be, suffer intensely — is, in short, the best guarantee any one of us can have against” the complete stagnation of the self.

Jo March really was like: I love the people around me and I cannot cope with them leaving and being mature and appealing enough to start new chapters in their lives while I'm still clinging onto this idealized, carefree, comedy-like lifestyle I thought was going to last forever. And I really thought platonic relationships could replace my repressed longing for a romantic one, but now all my loved ones' first priorities became romance. Meanwhile, I cannot put myself out seeking a romantic relationship because that would automatically mean altering, belittling, objectifying, and compromising myself my life would become a cliche with a guaranteed unhappy ending because I feel like no one in this world could truly make me happy. And I do want to embrace my independent single lifestyle, but I guess I didn't calculate back then how lonely it's going to feel. It's like my only choice is between two kinds of unhappiness.

Allow yourself to fail. Addressing your real need is no guarantee that your out-of-control behavior will disappear. Many people who address the real issue underneath a self-boundary problem are often disappointed that the problem keeps recurring. They think, Well, I joined a support group at church, but I still have problems being on time [or viewing pornography or spending money or being sarcastic, etc.]. Was all this for naught? No. The recurrence of destructive patterns is evidence of God’s sanctifying, maturing, and preparing us for eternity. We need to continue to practice to learn things. The same process that we use to learn to drive a car, swim, or learn a foreign language is the one we use for learning better self-boundaries. We need to embrace failure instead of trying to avoid it. Those people who spend their lives trying to avoid failure are also eluding maturity. We are drawn to Jesus because “he learned obedience from what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8). People who are growing up are also drawn to individuals who bear battle scars, worry furrows, and tear marks on their faces. Their lessons can be trusted, much more than the unlined faces of those who have never failed—and so have never truly lived.

Mature people act above their emotions and love beyond their comfort zones. This is the secret of growing together in marriage. It cannot be achieved by two temperamental snowflakes who are imprisoned by their feelings. It can only be achieved by those who are guided by their love for God, their dedication to each other, and their conviction that doing the right thing will be blessed in the end.

They say, a True King considers the advice of counsel but always follows his heart. Just like a Great Warrior. He is not the soldier that fights all the time, but one that knows when to fight and when to fly (hide). Same goes for a Wise Man, he doesn't just know what to say or do but also knows when, where, why, how and to whom he speaks or acts. Strength doesn’t lie in numbers and power is not a function of muscles. Weapons don’t bring peaceful slumbers, nor wealth a guarantee of good health. Maturity is not directly proportional to age and slavery does not necessarily mean being locked up in a cage. It takes courage to serve with reliance and grace to face your mistakes without defiance. He that is down need fear no fall; as a dog destined to be lost will never hear the hunter's call. Wisdom – wis-e dom-ain – is a realm to attain, a kingdom to reign in, not just some impulse or sensation. A man can never be slave to the knowledge he has, nor the understanding he applies. And therein lies his wisdom. Wisdom builds, understanding establishes and knowledge fills with wealth. The wealth of knowledge is understanding and the knowledge of understanding is WISDOM!

My first appeal shall be to that primary revelation of Himself which God has implanted in the heart and conscience of man. I am merely expressing the deepest and most mature, though often unspoken, convictions of millions of earnest Christian men and women, when I assert, that to reconcile the popular creed, or any similar belief in endless evil and pain, with the most elementary ideas of justice, equity, and goodness (not even to mention mercy), is wholly and absolutely impossible. Thus this belief destroys the only ground on which it is possible to erect any religion at all, for it sets aside the primary convictions of the moral sense; and thus paralyses that by which alone we are capable of religion. If human reason be incompetent to decide positively that certain acts assigned to God are evil and cruel, then it is equally incompetent to decide that certain acts of His are just and merciful. Therefore if God be not good, just, and true, in the human acceptation of these terms, then the whole basis of revelation vanishes. For if God be not good in our human sense of the word, I have no guarantee that He is true in our sense of truth. If that which the Bible calls goodness in God should prove to be that which we call badness in man, then how can I be assured that, what is called truth in God, may not really be that which in man is called falsehood? Thus no valid communication -no revelation -from God to man is possible; for no reliance can, on this view, be placed on His veracity.

In real life, the political and strategic games used by politicians and statesmen are in fact social games - requiring social intelligence as well as technical mastery of information. The skills of the orator, cultivated by ancient statesmen like Cicero and Demosthenes, or by modern statesmen like Benjamin Disraeli and Abraham Lincoln, require emotional maturity and the talent of seeing events through the eyes of others. A great statesman sets aside his own egoism. He takes a more objective view. In this way, he avoids the errors that attend a purely egoistic standpoint. The explanation which Kierkegaard offered, which is none too flattering, is that people no longer desire a great king, a heroic liberator or an authoritative religion. They don’t want strict rules or high standards. That is because they want an easy time of it. They want a soft existence which can only be guaranteed by eschewing the great and heroic, the true and the noble. This is the moral perspective of high politics and of true statesmanship. Only those who reach this fifth stage can transform world calamity into world regeneration.