Playing Grown-up

This entry is The Rev. BFF's fault, as we discussed it over pie yesterday.

By nearly all criteria, I count as a "grown-up"...I have completed four decades on this planet, have a house and job and teenagers.  I drive a sensible car, own more than two pairs of shoes, and have eaten a vegetable in the last day. 

I'm told that people consider me conscientious and wise.

I do not feel especially mature.
Why?

Well, for one, I still take rather a lot of pleasure in the cute and the whimsical.  My soap dispenser looks like a penguin.  I wore my cheesehead to a recent church event.  I spend a fair amount of my free time laughing at really hilariously dumb movies, and prefer my pop music stations to NPR.

And then there's the whole, "Well, I'm not as old as my mother." I do have a capacity for algebraic thought and I know that both of our ages continue to creep upwards at the same rate. But MAYBE I will be grown when I am her age. (This said, her soap dispenser has duckies, and most of her DVD collection is Pixar or Dreamworks.)

A rather ginormous piece of it, though, is that I do not feel like I have all the answers. I struggle to even come up with a question that only has one correct answer--I feel like that went away at some point in my sophomore year of college twenty years ago. Heck, every thing I learn seems to uncover dozens more facts and concepts and trains of thought I still need to investigate. 

James Luther Adams wrote about how revelation is forever ongoing.  While I value that as a tenet of my faith, let me just say that it is exhausting. If I could just check "Learn Everything" off my to-do list, there would be a lot more time for dumb movies. And blogging.

Instead, I keep adding to my "To-read" pile. And I'll get to that reading, as soon as I finish my comic book stack.