Do It Yourself

Your sense of how the world operates, and how you might get along inside it, grows out of two things: what you've lived through directly, and what other people have passed along to you. Working it out on your own can be frightening, and it sometimes hurts. It's still the best way to find out what actually holds up for you.

Part of why young people drift toward cults is that they arrive with real questions and the group hands them tidy answers. People tend to lean on a borrowed point of view, and the pull gets stronger when whoever is offering it sounds certain, because certainty reads as proof that they've got life figured out.

The trouble is that living is ongoing. An answer that fit you at twenty may stop fitting at forty. When that happens, anxiety creeps in: you were once sure you had the thing nailed down, and now the same answer fails to explain what's in front of you or help you choose. Sound decisions are usually something you build yourself, and most people are better served by being shown how the building is done than by having every decision handed to them finished.

A child ought to grow steadily more independent over the years. The exception is a child with a mental handicap, and even there the aim doesn't really change. You still help that child reach whatever independence he or she is capable of reaching.

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