YOU CAN ACHIEVE EMOTIONAL STASIS
There Has Always Been E. I. I. (Emotionally Induced Illness). There is probably no more emotionally induced illness today, nor any greater amount of emotional stress, than there was in days gone by. The world has always been full of it. People in bygone days didn’t meet the ups-and-downs of living with any less emotional stress than people do today. And although we of the mid-20th Century have such stresses today as the world political situation, practically every age had its world situations and its wars, in some ages much more constantly than we have had. Although we have the stress of an excessive amount of publicity on diseases of all varieties, past ages had the greater stress of smallpox, tuberculosis, diphtheria, plague, typhoid, dysentery, osteomyelitis, and many other miserable conditions which today are rare indeed.
No age ever “had it as good” as ours; no age has ever been as free from want, or as free from the effects of just plain weather, as we are. Every age has had emotional stress.
We, in the United States, probably have less emotional stress today than any people ever before in the history of the world. That isn’t the way you usually hear it. We pay more attention to the stress people are under today because we are beginning to learn about its importance. We are going to be able to reduce people’s emotional stress in the future just as we have reduced contagious disease. We are just beginning to learn how.
Emotional Stasis Versus Trouble
The most surprising thing about people who have E. I. I. (Emotionally Induced Illness) is that usually they do not have a great amount of trouble. You’d think they would, wouldn’t you? You would think the rule might be expressed in equations something like these:
Much trouble in life = emotionally induced illness. Little trouble = No E. I. I.
But this is not true. A large amount of trouble may, of course, help bring on E. I. I. but the majority of patients with E. I. I. actually have very little real trouble.
The chief factor that brings on E. I. I. is that the patient has never learned to maintain good healthy emotions in just plain, ordinary, everyday living – those situations where there are only the usual daily varieties of trouble every one of us has all the time. That factor contributes to 90% of the disease in E. I. I. patients.
They have never learned to produce a good, healthy stream of emotions in the face of the changing situations they meet in ordinary living. By ordinary living I mean having to make a living, having to meet problems of income and expenditure, having to discipline a family, having to iron out an occasional altercation. Death in the family must be faced, too, since that is a part of all ordinary living.
These patients have never learned the art of emotional stasis; they meet living with emotional stress. Emotional stasis is the ability to meet a wide variety of life situations, the bad with the good, with emotions like equanimity, resignation, courage, determination, cheerfulness, and pleasantness. The person who lacks emotional stasis meets most of his situations, good with bad, with emotions like anxiety, fear, apprehension, discouragement, disappointment, and frustration.
But, of course, what we are saying about the E. I. I. patient who doesn’t have a good healthy stream of emotions applies to almost all of us, since practically everyone, at some time or other (including you and me, dear reader), has E. I. I.
Emotional Stress Is Due to an Educational Failure
So many of us today, as well as most everyone in the past, has lacked emotional stasis because man leaves to chance a quality that must be learned. The only way a person can develop emotional stasis is through the right kind of education. But the right kind of education does not exist.
There is no place you can go to learn emotional stasis. There should be, but there isn’t. And there isn’t because it has taken mankind until the middle of the 20th Century to learn what emotional stasis is. Education in emotional stasis is coming, and some day our descendants will learn it in school. But that doesn’t help you and me right now, does it?
The family influence. A person’s total education, of course, includes much, much more than what he learns in the schools he attends. Our most important educational influence is the family we are brought up in. And there are many, many families whose effect on their children is a terrible and ruinous one. Most families develop strong emotional stress. There are many exceptions, certainly, but by and large, our families are educational flops of the first order.
Influence of our friends. The second most important educational factor each of us has is the people who live within our circle, those with whom we play, talk, visit, work, fight, love. This circle includes authors who enter our private worlds through their books, even though they may be dead. If we are lucky, some strong enlightened individual enters our circle and influences us in the development of a healthy attitude or two. But most of the people who stream through our lives are mediocre and full of educational stress.
Influence of our schools. Our schools are our third most important educational influence. The schools do not even pretend to do anything about emotional stasis. I think they will before long. There are several forward-looking educators who are beginning to plan for it and think about it. The central goal in our education should be to fit people for living full, enjoyable lives, instead of having them run a marathon of seventy years of emotional stress.
Influence of the church. The churches are our fourth most important educational influence. Like the schools they, too, do not have a conscious program for developing emotional stasis. Religion, as it is conceived by the churches, does not provide its members, or its clergy, with the type of emotions which save them from E. I. I. The clergy, in my experience, have functional disease as much as any other group. Only among the Quakers and the Christian Scientists is there an appreciable lack of E. I. I. I say this without prejudice; I belong to neither denomination.
“Maturity” Is Another Name for Emotional Stasis
The same educational influences which make for emotional stasis also make for the thing we call “maturity.” An education that would provide a person with emotional stasis would also provide him with maturity. Emotional stasis is the emotional counterpart of being mature.
It has been only recently that psychologists have come to understand, and to be able to state, just what maturity consists of. Maturity is just what it sounds like – the ability to react to life situations in ways that are more beneficial than the ways in which a child would react. Emotional stasis is exactly the same thing. Emotional stress is what a child produces when faced with a menacing situation; a mature person has emotional stasis in the same situations.
Psychologists have also become aware that few or no people are fully mature – there is some place in their personality where they still react like children, with childish stress emotions. There are only a very few people that even approximate full maturity simply because there is no organized educational effort to make us mature. It is left to chance. A few people are fortunate enough to fall into the hands of very sensible individuals who can show them how to achieve some degree of maturity, but even so, it is never the complete course.
A man in the forefront of his profession or industry will display to the public a fairly well-rounded maturity in the sense we are going to describe. But somewhere in his makeup, there is apt to be a very immature spot; in regard to some things that he meets in his living he will have reactions characteristic and worthy of a child.
Some public office holders, men in the headlines every day, are extremely immature in very fundamental ways. Once the public learns what maturity and immaturity are, men like these will no longer reach high office. They will be spotted for what they are – immature fakes – and society will be spared the nonsense and nuisance they produce.
Once our society makes it a point to train people to reach maturity and emotional stasis, there will be many, many more people reaching fairly well-rounded maturity. The entire complexion of public as well as private life will be changed for our greater good.
A Common Misconception of Maturity
I would like first of all to invite your attention to a common variety of immaturity which a certain group of men regard as maturity. This particular variety of immaturity causes a great deal of trouble to society, to the man who has it, and to the woman unlucky enough to have married the big stiff.
The most typical example of this immature hero is the rough don’t-give-a-damn-for-anything he-man-bravado individual who plays a kind of a four-year-old cowboy-bad-man game all his life. These are the gangsters, the bad men whom radio and television play up to their youthful audiences, and to whose activities the newspapers devote reams of copy.
This typical bad-man immaturity occurs much more frequently, in watered-down form, in the he-man who keeps his family at home while he participates in fishing, hunting, small gambling – the man forever going out with the fellows for this and that, and a drink.
I mention this group particularly because it is surprising how frequently their immaturity figures in the emotional stress of their wives and children. There are many variations of the immaturity represented by these two types. Every town has many of them around.
The tougher they are, and the tougher they act, the more immature and childish they actually are. Their babyhood crops out terrifically whenever one of them has to be stuck with a needle, or has to submit to some form of minor surgery without an anesthesia. They just can’t take it. I’ve seen some of the “toughest guys” in St. Louis, men who were in the headlines of gangsterism, carry on like babies when they were faced with an intravenous needle.
Their toughness is, of course, a front they kid themselves with. They simply can’t take it. They can’t stand stress of any kind, and they turn easily to drink, which is an ineffective way of easing tension. And so their concept of maturity comes to contain the idea of hard, regular drinking, just as it contained the idea of smoking when they were ten or eleven. Their concept of maturity, furthermore, contains the idea of “handling their women rough,” or with indifference. It’s a pity the law lets them marry.
These fellows come into the clinic when their concepts of maturity are beginning to show the strain – that is, in their forties or fifties. At that age, most of them are pretty poor physical specimens; they are children in every department of living. They have been children so long and so thoroughly they cannot conceive of any other state.
Their poor wives come to the clinic a little earlier – in their thirties and early forties. Their children come to the clinic still earlier. There are no problem children, only problem parents.
The Qualities That Make For Maturity
1. Responsible independence, the first criterion of maturity. A necessary step in growing up is the development of the ability to assume responsibility independently of father, mother, and other protective agencies. Long years of childhood, especially in families where protective concern is carried to an extreme, develop the tendency to keep depending on someone else. Many parents, especially mothers, strongly foster dependence when they should be molding independence.
Those who grow up with a dependent attitude sooner or later have a hard time. A wife runs to mother with every squall, and with every responsibility of marriage. This running to mother, and her consequent intervention, irritates the husband more and more. The marriage gradually falls apart at the seams, and everybody in the play, wife, husband, and mother-in-law, have emotionally induced illness.
Then there is the well-known boy who is made to depend on his mother. As he grows into his teens the boys make fun of him, and he feels that his dependency on his mother is a weakness. To prove his strength to himself and to his fellows he becomes a super kind of a regular guy, which is only a step away from gangsterism. After that there is petty crime, and trouble all over the landscape, with emotionally induced illness in mother, father, son.
Other people start out leaning heavily on parents, friends, relatives. When these supports are removed, they look for support in alcohol. They always have E. I. I.
2. Maturity means a giving, rather than a receiving, attitude. A characteristically childhood attitude is to want to receive, to be given desired things. In this immaturity, the person does things with the attitude, “What is this going to get me?” This is a springboard into mean, crabby emotions.
As they get older they no longer receive as they did when they were children, although they still think in terms of what they can get. They are in a dead end alley that leads to intense desire, and finally to intense frustration.
Two unmarried sisters had always lived together, supported by a fair competence left them by their father. Then an old uncle, who had always been a troublemaker, died, and left his farm to the older (by two years), with the provision that it would pass to the younger when the older died. But the younger sister wanted to get her share at once, and demanded that the farm be sold and divided equally. But the older sister had the farm, and she wanted to keep it. Over this, they quarreled. They left each other to live alone.
Today, they are both miserable with emotionally induced illness, and will continue to be until they both mature enough to want to give rather than to get. So far, after ten years, neither has matured. They are both slightly under fifty and have many years of ill health to look forward to. Furthermore, both have lawyers, and the litigation they are in may well cost them the farm the trouble-making uncle hung around their necks.
Maturity brings with it a rich concern: how to make the living of others more enjoyable. With this concern, horizons, vision, and sympathy broaden. The person with such maturity is not living in a little closet, grasping and pulling everything possible into its dark confines. He is roaming the sunshine and the great wide world, finding other people interesting and worth the effort of knowing and giving.
Actually, in his mean position, the constant receiver never learns what great enjoyment giving can bring; he does learn how his cramped, grasping, tight emotions produce almost constant ill health.
3. Maturity means leaving egotism and competitiveness behind. The childish attitude is, “I’ve got something you haven’t got,” or “I can do something you can’t do,” or “My father can lick your father.” There are many people who never lose this childish constellation of egoism and competitiveness. They are always hard to get along with because they are always pitting themselves against everybody else. They never develop a kindly cooperativeness. They are obnoxious as partners in a business, they are irritative in a gathering, they are quarrelsome in a twosome.
The over-competitive person. The person who constantly compares himself (in jealous competition) with everyone else is destined to be a miserable human being. He constantly generates envy, hurt pride, and hostility in himself and in others.
The irascible, headline-seeking politicians who are constantly imposing their will on everyone else are of this breed. If you watch their movements in Washington, they are frequently over in Bethesda Medical Center (which Congress built for the Navy and Congressmen) being “checked-over” or being treated for “sinus trouble” or having an operation for a substitution diagnosis of E. I. I.
These men consider themselves leaders, and highly mature. If their voting public only knew it, they are highly immature – immature in the category we are speaking of, as well as in most of the other categories of maturity. The continual blustering of this class of politicians produces anxiety in themselves, as well as in those they bluster against. In their innate childishness, they are striving to be something that isn’t in them – mature men.
Competition can be valuable. Competition, to a degree, has its place in living. But when it becomes too strong and all-pervasive, it defeats its own purpose. It produces anxiety, strain, stress, and remorse, and effectively precludes enjoyment even in those who are successful.
One of the elements in modern business and industry that produces a great amount of E. I. I. is the competition between those striving to get to the top. The managers of local stores in large chain systems are frequently seeking medical attention because they are pitted against each other on the sales sheet in their effort to rise above the local store. The same is true in banks and industries. Those who manage to go up in their system suffer from the strained aggression, and often have ulcers. Those who fail, suffer frustration and resulting fatigue and prolonged headache. Who wins? I don’t know; I haven’t as yet seen any of them win.
The system is at fault. We can say without exaggeration that a system of this kind is childish and immature. We may hope that with the passage of time it will perhaps grow up and develop a kindlier and more cooperative feeling for human beings. Today it is the ruin of many of the lives of those who serve under it. Is big business, big industry, pursued solely for its own sake, worth the human price? I am inclined to think it is not.
The building of a mature human being, that is to say, a happy human being, is the only honest and worthy business and industry that any of us has a right to have. Any form of industry and business that provides its human beings with an unhealthy set of emotions is as immature and socially undesirable as the childishly egotistical and competitive individual.
Dick was the manager of a local chain store. The store he was running was in competition with the other stores in other towns. To get to be district manager, Dick had to outsell the other managers of the competing stores. For a rather poor salary, he worked night and day. He developed an ulcer, but he became district manager. There were some other fellows in other stores who developed the same kind of ulcers without becoming district manager. In every competition, someone has to lose. Then they develop something besides an ulcer. But Dick became district manager. His pay was then a little bigger, but he had much bigger worries, and much bigger competition. He worked and stewed harder than ever, but his district fell behind someone else’s district, and he didn’t make the next promotion he was hoping for. So came the frustration of defeat with fatigue, constipation, headache, insomnia.
Then there are people like Mrs. B who has an ego as big and rough as the Tetons. Every contact she makes with anyone else is a competition in which she demonstrates that she is just a little smarter. She has outrun and out-punted her husband so long that the poor fellow drags around with a pitiful inferiority complex. At any meeting in which the chairman is silly enough to open the discussion, she rises militantly to her feet and starts out to change something, or someone. She is a frightful power in the woman’s club, a caution in the P.T.A., and a terrific headache in her bridge club. The city hall shudders every time she passes through. But nature is a balance of compensations. She pays dearly for her immaturity. Every so often at night, she privately develops a most disabling spell, which lasts until morning, and which leaves her deflated for a couple of days. The trouble with Mrs. B is that she hasn’t matured enough to become kindly cooperative with other human beings. She is a child in that respect. “My mamma can lick your mamma” is about where this aspect of her education stopped. Watch them sometime – the people who chronically run things are themselves run by the chronic effects of their own emotions.
4. Maturity in sex. The childhood sexual attitude is one of genital satisfaction in the interests of self-love without the realization that sex is part of the larger experience of mating. This, like every other experience involving two human beings, becomes mature only when kindliness, sympathy, and mutual cooperativeness enter into it.
Sexual immaturity is so very common largely because of the fears and inhibitions that block rational efforts at proper sex education. The schools, the families, the churches give the individual no organized instruction for handling sex in the course of his living. Most of the instruction is left to disreputable sources, and is of a disreputable flavor. Little wonder that so few grow up into sexual maturity.
Two types of sexual immaturity. One type of sexual immaturity is a hysterical fear of sex and all it connotes.
Rose was an extremely pretty girl who lived in a very rough neighborhood. Endeavoring to help Rose survive the tough neighborhood, her mother put a tremendous fear of sex into the girl. When Rose was married, years later, she was incapable of mating. Her husband tried every possible approach with infinite patience. But Rose withdrew more and more, physically and mentally. Knowing she was not a successful wife made her feel very guilty and inadequate. She developed a nonspecific ulcerative colitis and at one time she was hospitalized for an entire year.
Quite the opposite variety of sexual immaturity consists of making sexuality the most important thing in living.
Darlene grew up in a family that, in a vulgar sort of way, made a fetish of being uninhibited. The only kind of humor Darlene ever heard was the very broad, sexy variety. There was no restriction put on sexy movies; there were always mother’s sexy magazines around the house. The visitors who came to the house were of the sophisticated variety whose sophistication runs to sex.
Before Darlene was old enough to date, her mother thought it cute for her to go to dances and shows with boys. Darlene became pregnant before her time, and dragged the family through one affair after another. So far, and she is still only 35, Darlene has made herself enough trouble for a lifetime, and she is capable of filling up three more. She is complaining of one thing and another all the time, and has practically leased a chair in a doctor’s waiting room.
5. Maturity means living higher than the level of hostile aggressiveness. There are some who regard hostile aggressiveness – anger, hate, cruelty, and belligerency – as strength. Quite the opposite is true. These are childish arrests, gross forms of immaturity, signs of weakness, evidences of fear and frustration.
Childishly aggressive men. Children, living in a world in which they are relatively impotent, feel weak, dependent, and insecure. When they are frustrated in their desires by discipline, they react with anger, hate, belligerency, and, if they can, with cruelty. Many people grow into adulthood without growing out of this form of hostile aggressiveness. They remain cruel and belligerent because they still feel weak, dependent, and insecure. They are weak; they haven’t learned how to be strong. Only the strong can be gentle. The men who usurp power in the governments of the world, who rise to the top by cruel, aggressive, belligerent methods, are wrongly regarded as strong men, and, by common standards, as mature.
If it were generally realized that such men are, in fact, extremely childish and basically incompetent to guide human affairs, the people of their nation would vote them out or overthrow them before they could do much damage. Much of the damage the 20th Century has suffered has come from men of this variety. We have them also in America. Fortunately in this country they have not been able to usurp government, but their very presence is a threat we cannot afford. It is because so many people grow up without outgrowing their hostile aggressiveness that the only real danger of our time is man’s inhumanity to man.
Sometimes the immaturities of hostility and cruelty are displayed in full view on the surface, as they are in the gangster of the Dillinger type. That these men have their immaturity out on the surface is a fortunate thing for society, because society can and does react to it in a way appropriate to its danger. However, there are many who have the same type of immaturity but manage to keep it pretty well concealed; they are able to bring trouble to those unfortunate enough to get in their way.
The childish troublemaker. Bert, for instance, is a pleasant looking chap who would appear to be 100 percent harmless. One of Bert’s employers told me that after Bert came to his department many of his employees gradually began showing dissatisfaction and began making trouble in the department. There was a constant irritation and agitation for one thing and another. The problem became so bad that a quiet search was made for the agitator.
It turned out to be Bert, who in a quiet, pleasant, conversational sort of way dropped barbed suggestions and remarks to the other employees. Bert would put these barbs across in such a cunningly clever way that the employees themselves did not suspect that Bert was putting hostile thoughts into their heads. After Bert was fired, the department soon settled down into its old smooth ways. Bert never feels well and I suspect he never will.
Many are the women who have thrown themselves away by marrying one of these children with hair on his chest and more muscles in his arms than maturity in his head. Hell cannot hold anything worse than what these women go through on earth. Very often these husbands will have an outward bearing, appearance, and manner that makes the rest of the world think well of them.
The wife will say, “Other people simply cannot appreciate how mean and cruel he is every hour he is at home.”
Such fellows inevitably develop emotionally induced illness. They rightfully deserve it. But their wives do not deserve the emotional illness they get.
6. Maturity is being able to distinguish fact from fancy. It is characteristic of a child to accept a fancy as a fact, and not to try to differentiate between them. A child can afford to do this almost without limit because there is usually no practical disadvantage, or advantage, in doing otherwise. However, if the child grows into responsible adulthood and still cannot distinguish between fancy and fact, the results are a terrific amount of trouble that means misery and wrong emotions.
A widespread type of childishness. It is appalling how much of this kind of immaturity exists. Someone develops an idle fancy about someone else and starts a harmful rumor which becomes accepted as a fact.
A selfish, dishonest and in-every-way-despicable politician builds up a fancy concerning his value to the republic as an enemy of totalitarianism, and a great number of honest but immature voters accept the fancy as a fact. A man takes a fancy that he hears messages from God, and persuades other people that this is a fact. Religious wars and divisive hatreds among men are started on the basis of what is actually pure nonsense. Every person I have ever known who claimed to be receiving messages from God turned out to be a schizophrenic. A childish man fancies that nearly all human illness is due to displaced vertebrae, and gets people to accept this as fact. The communists start the fancy that their system is a heaven for the farmer and the laborer; a certain number of people accept it as fact.
With each instance of such immaturity, the world, or a part of it, must suffer. There is no immaturity that we pay for so dearly as this. It is expensive on a personal or a community level.
People who feel the world is against them. There is a common variety of this type of immaturity which especially merits attention. It is found in the individual who accepts as facts, and worries over, things that have never happened. Such a person lives in a terrible world of fancy, a terrible calamitous world where everything is bad, but yet a world which isn’t real because it doesn’t exist.
Actually, the everyday world we are in is a very enjoyable and highly interesting affair, in which the things which happen to us can be turned into some sort of a good feeling. But these immature people fancy that it is a terrible world which holds for them only the worst possible conclusions. They are afraid to stay alone in broad daylight because they accept as fact the fancy that something (they do not know what) is going to happen to them. Like the children they were and still are, they haven’t grown up, and they accept as fact the fancy of their unreal fears. Such people are common patients in the doctor’s office.
One patient, for instance, while working in the hay barn unloading hay, suddenly had the fancy, “Supposing there might be a snake in the hay.” Now there had never been a single snake on the farm; but the fancy came; and the woman allowed her imagination to develop the fancy with many thrilling and horrible ramifications until it assumed the status of a fact in her thinking, and it became impossible for her to go to the barn.
Another lady, in her sixties, came to my office with the complaint, “I know you’ll laugh at this, but I have a snake in my stomach; it’s been there many months and, whenever it is irritated, it bites me and makes me miserable.”
In every other respect she was perfectly sane, and, in the matter of this fancy, she was no more insane than anyone else who accepts any fancy as a fact.
You might like to hear the sequel to her snake story. No amount of examination, which included looking into her stomach with a gastroscope, could persuade the lady she had no snake. Finally one of our doctors, who was a slight of-hand artist, contrived, while putting in and drawing out a stomach tube, to bring a garter snake out of his sleeve saying as he did so, “Well, by Jove, you did have a snake in there, and here it is.”
“See,” the lady said triumphantly, “I told you so all the time.” She was much relieved and felt fine. Then, three months later, she came back and said, “I’ve got another snake in my stomach.” This was in winter, and the clever slight-of-hand doctor could find no snake for his act. The patient went to another clinic with her snake before summer came.
7. Flexibility and adaptability are most important parts of maturity. A person who does not learn to bend, unbroken, before a wind, and to adapt himself readily to changing conditions, cannot possibly be happy in a world where disaster can fall at any time with great rapidity and where the things we hold valuable one day entirely cease to exist the next.
Flexibility and adaptability are probably the most valuable kinds of maturity to possess. When circumstances are cruel, as they often are, when the ground we were standing on is taken from under our feet, the only quality that can stave off an illness-precipitating and misery-producing set of emotions is the ability to be flexible enough before the blows of fate; to remain unbroken, and adaptable enough to carry on valiantly under the new set of conditions.
It is only by possessing this kind of maturity that a person can avoid being upset if some of his basic needs are left unfilled. Without this maturity a person is forever finding himself in trouble. One simple form of flexibility and adaptability is Pollyanna’s, whose system is so good it has gone for 15 or 16 commercially-successful volumes. Her system consists in finding four good things hidden away in every bad thing that happens.
Another simple system is that of the woman who had a constantly drunken husband. She decided not to allow her situation to make her miserable, and strove to make life as pleasant as possible for herself and her children.
Another way is not to look back, reviewing the last catastrophe, but to look ahead, determining how much good can be introduced into the future.
Maturities and Certain Definite Attitudes
Maturities are, after all, nothing more than certain definite attitudes we develop in regard to ourselves and our relation to our world. But they are attitudes which are not developed without learning processes. They do not come naturally to people. They are part of the things we must learn. These attitudes determine whether we live happily or unhappily, whether we live healthily, or whether we wallow in ill health.
Every person can profitably ask himself, “How mature am I? In what respects am I still immature and how can I outgrow it?” A great many people find it possible to mature after they are 30, 40, 50, or even 60. All one needs is to be shown what he needs to learn, and to have the desire to learn it.
With maturity comes emotional stasis.
IMPORTANT POINTS
People have emotional stress and emotionally induced illness not because of overwhelming amounts of trouble, but because they haven’t learned to handle the ordinary amount of trouble which is normal in everyone’s living.
The ability to handle the various phases of ordinary human life in an effective way, that is to say, in a way that produces a maximum amount of enjoyment and a minimum amount of stress, is what is known as maturity.
Being mature means having emotional stasis, which is the ability to maintain equanimity, resignation, courage, determination, and cheerfulness when a situation might lead an immature person to apprehension, fear, anxiety, or frustration.
Becoming mature is a learning process. Unfortunately, there is no place today where people can learn to become mature. Our three educational institutions, the school, the church, and the family, all fall down in this essential part of our education.
Maturity consists of the following qualities:
- A well grounded feeling of responsibility and independence.
- A giving rather than a receiving attitude.
- Graduating from egoism and competitiveness to cooperativeness and the feeling for the human enterprise.
- Recognizing and accepting the social restrictions on sex, and making sexuality one item of many in a happy marital life.
- Realizing that hostile aggressiveness, anger, hate, cruelty, and belligerency are weakness, and that gentleness, kindness, and good will are strength.
- Being able to distinguish fact from fancy. Being flexible and adaptable to the changes in life dictated by fate and fortune.
Excerpt from How to Live 365 Days a Year