A Gift of Adulthood

I find myself being more and more inspired by my intellectual ancestors as I age. As a child and teenager, I was convinced that my life's value would be in forging a brand new path, in pioneering the future somehow. When I left home at 18, I realized that I was ignorant of the vast majority of the human experience, not by any virtue or vice of my own, but simply because this experience is complicated, vast, diverse, and often murky. It seemed appropriate to me, then, to adopt an asana of learning. I've adopted the principle that I have something to learn from each person I encounter, and this principle has served me as well as I have been able to hold to it (which is, of course, imperfectly). Lately, though, I've been benefiting from this principle in a very satisfying way: falling in love with those who have come before me.

In elementary and high school, we meet dead characters all the time. G. Washington, B. Franklin, A. Lincoln. Schools present these men to us as born geniuses, flawless, moral, brilliant thinkers and doers. My principle of learning from everyone teaches me that they were not as the schools portrayed them. They are, to a one, men and women, social, political, and academic, flawed and imperfect. This realization is very very liberating, and is what has allowed me to fall in love with them as people.

For example, consider Isaac Newton. For the last three hundred years or so, anyone who wanted to learn how the physical world worked started with Newton's laws. Given an afternoon, and a little bit of Galileo and Descartes, I could describe almost any human-scale physical system using Newton's three Laws of Mechanics. He's arguably the greatest and most well-respected scientist of all time. However, he was notably absent-minded, and had a reputation for loudly speaking his mind against any who disagreed with him. I imagine other people in his life took care of most of his circumstance, and that he would not have been so successful without the support of his friends and family. This is not a judgment against him; in fact, I celebrate his humanity, and I celebrate the love and faith with which those around him served him.

Also consider my new hero, Richard Feynman. This man won the Nobel Prize in physics, and claims in his memoirs to be the only one who watched the first atomic bomb test through a windshield instead of through protective glasses. He loved nothing more than teaching physics to university students, and took up drawing in his mid-40s. He got depressed after seeing what the military did with the atomic bomb. At one point, he even married the wrong woman. These are all faults I can relate to, and they inspire me to live my life with curiosity and no fear, as we are as well described by our failures as we are by our triumphs.

It's only with the benefit of a bit of perspective on life that I've come to realize what it means to find beauty in imperfection. This is the gift of adulthood: the realization that regardless of stature or place in history, each of us has assets and flaws, and the color of life comes from the interplay of the two. There is comedy and tragedy in this realization, and that is beautiful.