On Manning Up

My son turned 13 years old yesterday ??

I have felt the grief of him no longer being a child and now I feel the pride and joy of him growing-up.

He is not quite a boy anymore and not quite a man yet.

He’s in that confusing liminal space in between.

Rites of Passage

If we were Jewish, he might have a Bar Mitzvah around now.

When I was a kid growing up in France, this was the age where all my friends seemed to turn up to school wearing a silver ‘gourmette’ around their wrist with their name engraved. They’d just had their Communion.

If we lived in a tribe somewhere around the world he might have a Rights of Passage ritual (I really recommend watching the Episode 3 of The Human Playground on Netflix).

These rituals are adaptive strategies we’ve had for millennia to foster development from the latter stages of childhood into the early stages of adulthood. They are built to navigate the awkward of neither being a child, nor an adult. I believe they exist at their essence to support healthy psychological maturation. Particularly the nebulous move from co-dependence to independence.

But alas, the micro-culture my family swims in has no such psychological container or celebration of maturation.

?? Geek Note: I find it interesting that as far as I can tell, these rituals tend to happen cross-culturally around age 13 which tends to be the end of Piaget’s final Stage 4 of Child Development. It's also when a suffix like ‘teen’ shows up in english, but not in many other languages.

Walking Home

So on Saturday we created a ritual of our own. Accompanied by 5 important men from his life - men who love him very much - my son walked 20kms from a woodland where he climbed trees as a young boy, to a woodland near our current home where he now wild camps in a bivvy bag only, and builds fires as a young man.

On route he said to me in the forest:

'I'm so happy to be out in nature without my phone.'

We all discussed our transitions into our teens. The funny bits, the hard bits, the missing bits, the embarrassing bits, the shameful bits. We got lost and muddy. We found our way back onto the path.

As Gandalf said:

"Not all those who wander are lost." ??♂?

After 4hours of walking, we finished by celebrating him by standing in a circle together and each sharing one piece of advice for this phase of his life.

Advice we wished we’d been given at that age.

But most importantly, we told him that whilst from now on it might get messier, he should know that he has our support as he looks to find his own unique way into manhood.

A Good Man (rather than a-not-bad-man)

Broader culture has rightly been asking men to re-evaluate what it might mean to be a man. This is positive in many ways. But there is someway to go I believe.

A problem I see, is that whilst there is discussion about how not to be a man (not being ‘toxic’ for example), there isn't all that much talk about how to be one. It’s a double negative, rather than a positive.

Surely there must be more to being a good man, than not being a bad one!

We know what we want to get rid of from the old, but we don't yet know what we want to conserve from the old, or what we might create that's new.

Currently, in this reevaluation process, the implicit message to a man in a leadership position for example, might be about ‘how not to lead’, but not necessarily how to lead.

One might fear the mistakes one might make managing their team for example, without seeing the positive potential they have to show up in an authentic way that benefits others.

I particularly don’t believe this is all that helpful and healthy for a boy becoming a young man. I see it as telling him what not to be, but not what he can be. It shows him what he can get wrong, but not necessarily what he can get right. I think it can slip into being a psychology predominantly of fear.

The path forward is perhaps less clear for him than it was for me at his same age.

We are rightly in a period of questioning, but questions alone can leave an unhealthy void, and a young person particularly tends to need guidance in navigating any sort of void.

On BECOMING A Man

So I hope he’ll leave this experience with a sense that he can increasingly stand on his own two feet knowing that guidance is available to him. Knowing he is held by the love and support of other men.

But I also hope that perhaps he’ll take on the message that becoming a man can be a beautiful and positive thing.

It is a never ending process.

It’s the ‘becoming’ bit that matters.

The verb.

Manning…

To man…

So when the time is right, I wonder if perhaps the world would benefit from us reclaiming the pejorative expression To Man Up…

Let me have a stab at it.

To Man Up (Verb) ~ The never ending, ongoing process of a man gradually and incrementally becoming a better version of themselves in order to be of greater service to others.

The world needs good men.

I’m happy to have spent my weekend with some of them.

Be well,

Jon ??

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