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Adulthood

If there’s an instruction manual to life, please pass it my way.

A new oven will come with an instruction manual guiding you how to use it. Press this button to switch it on. This setting is best for these types of meals. If you go to Ikea or another home store and buy a book shelf for your office, this too will be accompanied by a booklet both telling and showing you how to build it. Tablets will have instructions inside the packaging about how to take them safely and correctly so that you get the results that you need. A new car will always have a user guide placed neatly in the glove box.

After all it’s what you’re paying for, you’d complain if these important sets of information were left out. In fact, most things come with directions except one thing and that is life itself.

A friend pointed out to me recently how there is no handbook to the in between phase of life at around eighteen until twenty-five. No booklet telling you how to transition from childhood to adulthood. You grow up, go to school, get a job or continue with further study and suddenly you’re an adult and expected to just know despite there being no written guide to adulthood either. You’ve got to know things such as managing stress and enjoying life. You’ve got to figure out how to choose a career and secure a job which gives you an income that you’ll be able to survive on. You must know all about mortgages and bills, know how to appropriately act all the time, know how to be happy.

A lot of these can be helped by talking to parents or relatives and having support from friends and loved ones, but it all seems quite daunting nonetheless. Besides, there are countless aspects of life that are complicated and cannot be taught (or ever fully mastered). There are situations that you’re supposed to understand such as why good people die so young, why we must be nice to bad people and why those who have everything are still so sad. Why someone who never smoked or drank is taken early from this world, yet someone who smoked since they were eight years old is still going strong at one hundred.

We’re supposed to understand about living in the moment and loving it because our own mortality is real. This is still meant to happen on days when we’re not feeling in an enjoyable mood and can’t see a way of changing that. How people can be so cruel to animals and other humans. Sods law and how it’s true every time. We’ve got to work out where the last year has gone and how it’s already almost February (tricky stuff).

Love in general is a difficult thing to grasp. Relationships too and why we’re fonder of some people than others. Friendship and how we randomly select a group of humans who appeal to us and stick with them (hopefully) for most of our lifetime. Marriage; why some last and some fall apart, how do we find the one and how long do we have to wait? Families and their huge complexities. I could continue, but I won’t.

Social encounters can complicate matters further. We are expected to act in certain ways in one set of company and entirely differently in another. We must bite our tongues often and not get cross about little things people say or do, it’s not worth it. Always smile in public even when we’re feeling in the lowest mood we’ve ever felt because most people aren’t close enough to care. Then when we’re alone again we will analyse our every move and be embarrassed at certain things we said or messing up because we’re not perfect and all make mistakes.

Then comes the little questions that we consider all the time like why some days we feel so exhausted for no reason yet on others when we should be tired after a late night we feel fine. Why we can go to the pub and drink three bottles of wine followed by two gins, stay up until 3 and feel good at work the next morning, but sometimes just have a bottle at home and feel rotten the next day. Why we constantly apologise for who we are to people who don’t need an apology and love us regardless The list goes on and on.

There are lots of subjective topics in this world that we will never understand and that can’t be taught. Life is ridiculously involved. However, when things become a little overwhelming occasionally, don’t fret. It’s a huge thing our existence and nobody gets it totally right ever. Trying your best is all that you can do, I’m sure you’re doing a great job so keep going.

4 replies on “If there’s an instruction manual to life, please pass it my way.”

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