I Won't Grow Up

Somewhat miraculously, I have managed to reach the age of 57 without experiencing the grief and loss over the death of any immediate family members. My parents—married nearly 63 years—along with my 60-year-old brother and I, recently sat around the family dinner table in the house I grew up in; I have only known life that includes that primordial home and all of the people in it. As a result, I felt like a child a lot longer than most people, and continue to feel a lot younger than some Assisted Living facilities seem to think I am; apparently most of them will take anyone over 55!

On the other hand, it is definitely true that I could actually use a bit of assistance in living; someone to track my Frequent Flyer miles, for starters. (Somehow I have flown all over the world more than just about everyone I know, and yet I have only managed to get one free flight my entire life!) But when exactly did my youth skip right through middle age into the domain of senior citizen? How is that possible? I still have part of my Matchbox miniature car collection displayed proudly on a shelf, along with my full stack of Hardy Boys books. I still play the electric guitar I got in 8th grade, and the piano my parents bought when I was five, using the reparations money my mother was awarded by Germany as a consolation prize for having survived the Holocaust.

Someone once suggested that I was a clear example of the "Eternal Puer" syndrome: "Puer Aeternus," Wikipedia tells us, "is Latin for eternal child, used in mythology to designate a child-god who is forever young..." (So far, so good.) "Psychologically it refers to an older man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level." (Bummer. But I actually don't think I've advanced as far as adolescence yet, so maybe that's better?) "He chafes at boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable." (True, unless it's at the hands of Mistress Alexandra in the The Dungeon.) "The ‘positive' side of the puer appears as the Divine Child who symbolizes newness, potential for growth, hope for the future..." (I'm up for the newness and growth, but the Zen people warn that "hope for the future" is a prescription for despair in the present.) "The ‘negative' side is the child-man who refuses to grow up and meet the challenges of life face on, waiting instead for his ship to come in and solve all his problems." (I do face some of the challenges of life. Just last week I put together and successfully hung a two-tiered bathroom shelf unit for my Dad, and it involved using those little plastic anchor thingies. As for waiting for my ship to solve all my problems, I'm not that naïve. I only think it would solve some of my problems, primarily the one about waiting for the ship.) And finally, "There is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about."

In many spiritual circles, it is suggested that a lot of us suffer from this last one, the vague notion that our "real" life hasn't quite kicked in yet and remains forever just out of reach, around the next corner, waiting for us to accomplish this or that, move here or there, meet him or her, earn a certain amount, achieve a particular position. The obvious problem with this is that around the next corner is always another corner, and we never get there. In fact, we can't get there from here, and according to everyone-who-is-anyone in the God business, here is where the action is. Real life is already in progress, and those of us who are always looking to the future are in the meantime missing the only show in town. The usual metaphor used is sleep vs. wakefulness. When asked who he was, and whether he was enlightened, Buddha is said to have simply replied, "I am awake."

As a newborn child/Prince, it was prophesied to the Buddha's father, the King, that his son would grow up to either be a great king or a great holy man. Preferring the former, the King attempted to prevent his son (Siddhartha Gautama) from seeing the realities of life by restricting him to the plush interior of the palace grounds. But eventually Siddhartha slipped through the gate and came face to face with aging, disease and death, causing him to relinquish his life of royalty, his wife and child, and begin his quest for truth, awakening and Buddhahood. I, too, slipped through the gates of our family palace a long time ago. We all have. There is no scarcity of aging, disease and death surrounding all of us, all of the time. It's a worldwide epidemic. I may still think I'm a kid, but somehow all my friends seem to be aging, some have died, some relatives are seriously ill and many have already passed on. None of us thinks it will happen to us, despite the Tibetan yogi Milarepa's admonition:

"You people sitting here think that death will come sauntering over to you. NO! Whenever death comes, it strikes like lightning!"

I just hope my ship comes in before the lightning strikes, which would wreck everything.

"Peter Pan Syndrome" is the pop-psychology version of the Eternal Puer, (a Jungian notion) but it was with great relief that I learned from Wikipedia that "Peter Pan Syndrome is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and is not yet recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder." Whew. Close call. One can't help but wonder, though, given the propensity for new diagnostic labels to magically elicit new and expensive pharmaceutical cures, what drug would have emerged to deal with Peter Pan Syndrome? An "Emotional Aging" substance? It causes the user to develop a sudden urge to get a prostate exam, watch The Charlie Rose Show, and sit on park benches feeding pigeons. "Side effects include constipation, resignation and user may cease to enjoy previous activities."

In defense of Peter's signature I-won't-grow-up position, an argument could be made that the freshness of vision that is natural to a child is not wholly unrelated to the wakefulness of a Buddha. The child sees life with an immediacy of presence and direct experience, from a place of native innocence; the Buddha from hard-earned wisdom. The difficulty arises in that long, tedious period between childhood and Buddhahood—our lives—during which time we suffer the burden of becoming the dreaded "grown-up," which, from a kid's perspective, always seemed to mean, "No more fun." It's no surprise, then, that the grown-ups who are living their lives fully and enjoying it to the hilt, are those who managed to retain or recover their original ability as kids to embrace and love life authentically, without pretense and whole-heartedly. (Are there really any grown-ups out there who truly love life? What am I missing? What about the whole aging, disease and death part? As Woody Allen said, "If one person is starving anywhere, it wrecks my whole day." Word on the spiritual street is, achieving Buddhahood, i.e. "waking up," brings us to a direct realization that everyone's True Nature is not the one that dies, or was ever born, that we all exist outside of time and body as pure Awareness and empty Consciousness, which gives us a bit of a handle on the tragicomedy of our situation. So there is a happy ending, but the paradox those enlightenment guys kill you with, is that they also insist that the happy ending is not up ahead of us in the future, but is already present, were we only awake to it. They're messing with our heads.)

May we all awaken, remain young-at-heart, grow up and not just face life but dance with it, get old gracefully, and die peacefully. In the meantime, I have to start getting my Halloween outfit together. This year I'm wearing a three-piece suit, carrying an attaché case and going as a Management Consultant.