having reached an advanced stage of mental or emotional developmentThen there was an example sentence:
"a young man mature beyond his years" and i wondered why it didn't said: "a young woman mature beyond her years". I mean it's just an example.
Anyways.
Now, this was the definition close enough for me to be a "perfect definition" but it had so many flaws when I tried to make a practical thing out of it. I mean can I actually make out, using this definition, that If a person is mature or not? Reading this definition over and over again make me feel that all other people, who are not mature, are retard.
Now I love Einstein and his incredible theory of relativity. You can put it with anything and make some sense out of it. If the person, whom you want to think that you are mature, thinks that you are mature or have reached an advanced stage of mental or emotional development , makes you mature for that very person. This also implies that the person who thinks that you are mature should be mature enough to think that way. Now here is the tricky part, this other person could be you yourself. I can not resist myself seeing a recursive situation here with lots of troubles followed. To avoid this, it is always good to let others do this job of being the other person.
Getting out of the recursive loop and coming back to the subject of discussion, let's see another aspect to this. By now it is very much clear that this definition, on its own, is good for nothing. It has another variable: The Other Person, a human being who decides whether "some-one" has actually reached an advanced stage of mental or emotional development( assuming here that the other person is "Mature" enough to do this job). The tricky part here is that human are human. They are always prone to prejudice. People always have some pre-convcieved lovely picture-frame build in their mind. They try to fit every thing in it. And if someone fails to fit-in, they simply conclude them to be unfit for their picture-frame. Further we cannot consider human to be just a variable; A human is influenced by numerous other variables which makes the individual personality. Some people have high expectations. Some people have ego issues. Some people are impatient. Some people are prone to misunderstandings. And some people are too simple to understand the complications surrounded by a rather very simple looking thing.
I'm not sure but may be maturity lies in not trying to be mature in a way others want you to be. It lies in being yourself and doing things which you like doing in your own way. And let the mature people out there decide if you are mature or not. If they think you are not; hard luck! You can always smile though that there could be more mature people out there who think the same way for them. See relativity :-)
