I watched a grown man lose his mind over a parking space once. A mall car park here in Bangkok, a spot he swore he’d been waiting for, a smaller car that nipped in ahead of him. He got out. There was shouting, then some gesturing I won’t describe in a family publication. He looked about fifty. Wedding ring, sensible sedan, the full kit of a life properly assembled.
And I remember thinking: there it is. A man who has aged beautifully and not grown up one inch.
Maya Angelou got to that thought long before me, and put it far better:
“Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.”
She really did say this, more than once and usually in more words. The tidiest version traces to a 1990 Paris Review interview [1], and the card you’ve probably seen is trimmed from a longer, better answer. The parking-space detail is hers. I just got to watch it happen live.
Ageing does itself
Here’s the uncomfortable engine under the quote. Time ages you at no charge. You don’t have to lift a finger. You’ll get older lying in bed, sitting in traffic, scrolling your phone at 1am. It asks nothing of you at all.
Growing up is the part that stubbornly refuses to happen by itself. And because it’s hard and entirely optional, most of us quietly swap it out for a checklist. Marriage. Mortgage. A child or two. A credit score you could show your mother. We tick the boxes and hand ourselves the medal marked “adult,” when all we’ve really proven is that we can operate the machinery of a life.
Angelou’s dig is that the machinery was never the point. You can run every bit of it flawlessly and still be, on the inside, the same person you were at nineteen. Just with more keys, more logins, and a worse back.
The awkward companion piece
I argued not long ago that growing old is a privilege denied to plenty of people, and I meant every word. This is the inconvenient sequel to that idea.
Getting the privilege is one thing. What you do with it is another matter entirely. People are handed the decades, the very thing so many others never get, and then spend them becoming world-class at finding parking spaces. The years are the gift. Growing into them is the work, and the work can be politely declined for a lifetime.
The two ideas need each other, if I’m honest. On its own, “growing old is a privilege” curdles into a fridge magnet. On its own, Angelou’s line is just a clever way to feel superior to strangers in car parks, which, going by my opening paragraph, I clearly haven’t fully outgrown myself. Put the two together, though, and you get something with teeth. Not everyone is even granted the years to begin with. Spending all of them on logistics, and then mistaking the logistics for a life well lived, is the quiet tragedy tucked inside a great many comfortable ones.
I have worked with fully grown children
I ran a small restaurant business for years, which meant hiring a lot of people and watching them up close under pressure, where character has nowhere left to hide.
One of the best cooks I ever took on was twenty-two and more grown-up than most people twice his age. Steady when a service fell apart. Owned his mistakes before I could even point at them. Never once made his bad day everybody else’s problem.
Then there was a man pushing fifty, married, kids, a house, every external stamp of a serious adult, who would sulk like a teenager if I so much as questioned his risotto. Same kitchen, opposite ages, and the older one was the child in the room. The milestones told you nothing about which was which.
What growing up actually costs
Angelou’s fuller point was about the price of admission. Growing up, she reckoned, costs you the earth, because you learn firsthand what it takes to love someone and lose them, to attempt something that matters and fall on your face. Ageing is free. This is the expensive one.
I worked this out embarrassingly late. I was shipped off to boarding school in Australia as a boy, a long way from home in Manila, and I learned to fend for myself in a hurry. For years I mistook that for maturity. But looking after yourself is a skill, like changing a tyre. It has almost nothing to do with sitting inside a real loss, or owning a failure without immediately scanning the room for someone else to pin it on. That part arrived much later, and it hurt a great deal more than homesickness ever did.
Self-sufficiency looks like growing up. It photographs beautifully. It simply isn’t the same animal.
How to tell which one you are doing
Since none of this gets printed on your birth certificate, you have to check by other means. A few questions I run on myself, usually on the evenings I’ve behaved badly:
Do I still quietly hand my parents the bill for how I turned out? Angelou said elsewhere that growing up begins the day you stop blaming them, and she wasn’t wrong about that.
Can I take a piece of criticism without treating it as a declaration of war? Have I changed my mind about anything that genuinely mattered in the last five years? Can I say “I was wrong” out loud, without a lawyer present and three qualifying clauses bolted on the end?
Not one of these carries an age requirement. Someone of twenty-five can pass the whole set. Someone of sixty-five can fail every last one from behind a very impressive desk.
The good news is the door never locks
Here’s the mercy hiding under the sting of the quote. If growing up were bolted to age, you’d be stuck for good with whatever you’d managed to become by now. Since it isn’t, the door stays open. You can start the actual work at thirty, at fifty, at eighty. Angelou herself kept getting larger as a person deep into old age, long after she’d have been forgiven for coasting.
My parking-space friend could, in theory, wake up tomorrow a slightly bigger human being. Most of us won’t manage it on any particular tomorrow. But nothing locks behind us, and that strikes me as the most hopeful thing buried in an otherwise fairly brutal observation.
Age will keep turning up on schedule, no effort required. Growing up you have to go and fetch for yourself. Might as well make a start before the next row in the car park.
[1] Maya Angelou, The Art of Fiction No. 119, Paris Review (1990), interview extract