If personal growth were only for children, it would be a mistake to look to parent-child relations for general insights into the dynamics of love. But growth does not stop when one reaches what is misleadingly called “the age of maturity.” We humans are distinguished by the fact that our potentiality is gradually given over to us, as our charge, so that the good does not merely provide us with our proper measure but also with our calling, our lifelong task. Having been born into the human world, we are called to carry on with the work of birthing, slowly hatching the human being we are called to become. The younger self must help give birth to the older self, in the medium of its own future. This means that our younger selves are called upon to parent a child whose wisdom we hope will exceed our own. To do this we must draw upon our own half-formed insights, along with whatever guidance we can find in the wider human world, to actualize goods that as yet we can see only hazily, in hopes that eventually we will see them more clearly.
Alan Jacobs
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