Living In The Present / Via Taoism

When do people grow up?  Is there a defining moment you can pinpoint when somebody transfers from youth to, well, whatever comes after youth?  Basing growth on a number is such a subjective and obscure notion.  I found myself questioning the mental and emotional maturity of some people the other day simply based on their age, a relative and inconsequential number.  These are the same people who are working at pointless jobs, wasting their lives doing something they hate for minimum wage pay, waking up early and going to bed late, spending the majority of their time unhappy and making enough just to scrape by, drinking to erase their problems, their mistakes, the turns their lives took that led them to the unfulfilled places they live in right now.  And these are the people that need somebody to put down, to make feel small in their world of insignificance in this huge and daunting world they are trapped in.  And so what if that person happens to be me?  I'm stronger already than they ever will be, nearly a decade younger but with a greater understanding of their situational difficulties than they themselves may even posses.  So who am I to ask them what they're doing with their lives?  Working at a mountain resort edging closer and closer to 30 years of age, living off of minimum wage and trying to support a family or a habit or anything that makes them feel more alive.  And I question them and I judge them and I forget to see that they are simply people with problems, too.  I can quantify their supposed issues as much as I want, but even that won't justify my disdain.  Asking whether or not they have "grown up," have matured or learned or changed in some way since some earlier moment in time... that is irrelevant.  The simple fact of the matter is that the age of a person does not dictate their mental health, their emotional well being, their psychological understanding or breadth of knowledge displayed through literacy or illiteracy, the choices they make and the decisions they regret, the career they have placed themselves in (or perhaps have found themselves stuck in).  All of these things are non correlated - they simply are.  They can change, they do change, they are constantly changing. 

Growth is a process, change is a given, age is a number.