The title of this post, a quote from the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, is one of many gems sprinkled throughout an essay by Rachel Kushner in a recent New Yorker magazine.
The rather startling phrase sums up a great deal of longing experienced in youth, when the wrong hair, the wrong clothes and all the secrets you do not yet know conspire to exclude you from a secret world of access and understanding.
I learned this lesson in summer camp. I went at age 12 because my older cousins had gone, they had enjoyed the experience, and my father happened to be very suggestible to my uncle’s ideas of what type of childhood experiences would build character.
My first year there I was in the bunks, where they housed the younger kids in log cabins with indoor plumbing. This was distinct from the army tents – concrete slab foundations with permanent wooden walls going up about 6 feet covered with a canvas roof.
I came in corduroy shorts and t-shirts, like the California hillbilly that I was, only to find cosmopolitan boys who used product in their hair and Drakkar Noir on their wrists and necks; boys knew how to breakdance competitively and were unafraid to ask a girl to go out.
It turned out that my Toughskins, while durable as shorts go, did not have the cachet of the Generra jackets and Flojos flip flops that the in crowd wore. I never lacked for material things, but was caught off guard that I possessed the wrong ones.
This did not make me desire those signifiers of inclusion, as it did other children, but it did make me aware that there were entire worlds of existence (sex, underage alcohol consumption) that simply were not part of my much smaller world.
Ibred a curiosity about an unforeseen future that would inevitably enlarge my set of experiences. I very much wanted to accelerate that process, to lose my provincial ignorance and enter adulthood.
That sense of longing is something I now observe in my own kids. The educational process only aggravates their sense that today’s purpose to create stepping stones for tomorrow, the present ever in service of the future.
Slow down.
Enjoy this moment.
You have no idea how beautiful you are, or how complicated life will become.
After all the fuss, being an adult is not a solution – just an invitation to more problems.