Growing is a continuously never-ending process. All beings grow physically, but in terms of maturity, humans also have the mental aspect to it.

Physical growth has never been a matter of much heed. Born to life, we grow and age, get sick along the way and eventually death comes to pick us up on his ride. Mental maturity, on the contrary, is another story.

Mental maturity is something you only have when you consciously take on the responsibility to tend your own life and well-being, then put forth efforts to fulfill it. You don’t grow mentally unless you dare, because it’s an arduous journey which requires a flexible mentality, good adaptivity and some courage.

Normally, it is quite observable that most of the time, people simply choose to stay within their comfort zone: they settle with the way of life of their own liking and don’t want to change. On one hand, this is understandable because they don’t see a need to change – they think they’re doing everything just fine, and so, why bother? On the other hand, this a just a type of static mentality, which goes to show that they are not willing to make efforts to make their own lives better. In addition, they do not understand why they should change. For example, a person who has always had everything they want since birth won’t understand the struggle another has to take to achieve something from zero.

Life has always been full of stressors of all kinds. Hard times come and go, and among those, there are experiences that either make you become stronger or break you for good. If you can cope with the circumstances, then hardship will work its way, forging a hardier and more refined being out of you every time, and you might one day become a living legend of what you stand for, the values you protect and preserve, and for all that you have gone through.

Humility is one of the highly regarded qualities attributed to a refined human being. An individual’s true finesse lies mainly in the soul; appearance, style and material possessions are only the tip of the iceberg. It is, thus, why humility is a clear indicator of true maturity.

A wise and learned person knows that (s)he knows little or simply nothing at all compared to the vast knowledge of humanity and to the unanswered questions, countless mysteries and unknown things of life and the universe, whilst a little-learned person boasts about almost everything. True maturity is when your behavior speaks it, you needn’t talk of it. Likewise, humility at its finest is when it’s no longer simply a quality to talk about, but when it becomes part of one’s behavior.

People say maturity comes with age, which is true, but on the condition of experience. Age and experience are proportional to one another, but the latter depends on a lot of factors, both subjective and objective, while the former is in constant automatic progress. Your experience is specifically the number of events that occur throughout your lifetime and what you learn from each event. And so, the question is: What makes an experienced individual? Is it just going through a lot of things in life? In a way, yes, but it’s incomplete (as you may have observed, there are always people in their 30s or 40s or even older that act inconsiderately or behave in a somewhat spoiled/obnoxious manner).

Then, what makes a person experienced? The required condition is exposure to the external world, which is essentially about giving yourself as many experiences as possible, both good and bad (Well, illegal activity is certainly not advised upon conscientious choice), which will eventually complement each other. The next thing you need, the completing factor, is what I call “a genuine concern” for others, which is a sense of community that drives you to act for the sake of the greater good. Of course, everyone has their own circle of relationships, but that doesn’t mean we should just “I don’t give an F about those other than the ones I care about”.

With even just a fraction of that selfless thought in mind, you will push yourself to learn how to behave in particular situations, which makes you a well-mannered person – a good sign of maturity.

Life isn’t supposed to be but right and wrong. Ironically, it’s the way we see things – our view of the world is binary. Everything through the subjective minds is simply a matter of perspective. Different angles offer (slightly) different appearances. However, the binary world view is still correct in basic and specific situations, e.g. you don’t go around hitting people and say it’s for fun; or another example, a case of killing in which the killer committed the act by accident, because he was defending himself against the aggressor – the point is, if people don’t know the reason behind the event, it would be easy for many to come to a biased conclusion. In such cases, there needs to be a certain differentiation between right and wrong in order for justice to be executed.

Solely when you realize how elastic life, nature, the universe and the way things are, will you commence to understand and have a faint image of what everything is about, for there is always something that surpasses the human cognition and that’s why we need to learn constantly and hone ourselves constantly.

Human societies are teemed with stereotypes, fixed ideas and preconceptions. There can be various reasons to why it is so: saving time by making quicker decisions, maintaining collective stability for easier management and to ensure better order and unity, the need to be on the positive/good side of everything (since nobody wants to be the wrong-doer), etc.

Maturity comes along with the wisdom you gain along the way, from the reflections you have on yourself in correlation with external events. Once you understand better the nature of things, you will become more empathetic towards people around you, and that subsequently motivates you to learn how to handle different situations more flexibly.

Perhaps there is no end to the maturing of the mind, since wisdom is determined by knowledge as well, and knowledge is boundless. As long as you live, you learn. Thus, maturity is when you realize the more you know, the more you feel you know nothing, and so you reap for yourself humility just to be in an endless hunger for more and more self-refinement.