In our world of today, it is normal for people to live beyond sixty-five years of age. What we sometimes forget is that our most flexible years probably occur within the first fifteen years before we start the process of ossification.
Puberty and the Teenage Conundrum and Doldrums
Apparently, as teenagers, we lose some critical intelligence, hopefully temporarily, as our bodies go through puberty and we emerge as the full article, for better or for worse.
What I mean to say is that I love teenagers and I do not wish to criticize teenagers. I was once a teenager myself and I know what it entails. There is nothing wrong with being a teenager. It is something we all have to experience. But, but, but, but, if one loses flexibility during one's teenage years and this means a loss of the ability to think clearly then everyone suffers in the long run. The teenager can grow up to be an unreasonable adult demanding quite insane things from his or her teenage off spring later in life. The problem of inflexibility gets passed from generation to generation.
If one does daily forms of yoga, exercise, meditation, prayer or stretching one is reminded how much easier these activities would be if one were a child before ossification, rather than a more mature individual.
Take yoga, for example, in which we sit, move, bend, reach, and stretch. Compare yourself to a child. It is quite noticeable how quickly we lose our flexibility as we age. The corollary of that is the notion that if we maintain our flexibility or bring it closer to that which we felt as a child, we gain something valuable.
Our years of ossification are a necessary step, but they appear to have consequences that reach well into the future. Indeed, the years of losing flexibility are damaging both to us as individuals and to society as a whole. Why do I say that? Well it occurs to me that ossification is like rigidity, and as you know I have a thing about linearity.
Linearity and linear thinking is pretty close in my mind to rigidity, and linearity is a special case of curvature, then linearity is a loss of flexibility. What I am saying is that our brains may ossify as much as our bodies as we lose intelligence during the period of puberty. This means that we fixate while we are going through a period of reduced intelligence. This has an impact on our potential. Would that we could maintain our intelligence more constantly without the negative impact of raging hormones that are the fodder for wars as well as love.
At the worst, it means that our teenagers become automatons behaving as though they are stupid and unthinking. The negative results can be so extreme that they go off to fight a war that has nothing ultimate to merit it other than death and destruction. The teenagers that lose their intelligence temporarily and are vulnerable to manipulation by terrorists, or destructive thinking end up in a world that is governed by fear.
We also see that many tennagers can be convinced to take drugs that are poisonous, that they are scratchy and snarly in their behavior, fight authority, exhibit cruelty. Yes, and if these characteristics ossify into the individual think what we get as a result. We get a population of people operating below their potential doing things that as children or more flexible adults, they would never do.
Ossification of the Mind, Raging Hormones and Insane Acts
The most insane or least intelligent act people of this period might do is commit suicide to terminate their own life through a form of addiction or become a suicide bomber and blow up a section of the community, or worse still organize a unit of insane killers.
We notice these people in our midst, the ones that seem to have lost their intelligence as they go through puberty, and we say and do little about it. They scare us and with their less intelligent ideas and arrogance, they bring the community into a world that is more ossified and less flexible. They bring about war and destruction. What we need is for young adults going through this period to be trained in the arts of flexibility.
The arts of flexibility are daily yoga, exercise, meditation, prayer, and stretching. We may not be able to control the effects of growth hormones ossifying their brains, but we can show these kids how to maintain a bit more of what their brains have to offer in the way of being more flexible and less rigid.
Now I am just skimming the surface on this, and there may be much more that schools can do to prepare their young maturing adults for a world in which flexibility is needed more than ever before. This is perhaps why such things as computer games, art, body building, and music classes may help our kids to be more flexible. But, we must not forget how inflexible we get as we mature beyond puberty.
Proposal for Maintaining Our Flexibility
It is important that we review our child skills, the ones we lose as we go through puberty. We need to get out doors, run around, play games, have fun, meet people of all ages, and backgrounds, of all nationalities and creeds and compete in sports. This is much better than protesting in the street, carrying rifles, and hitting head with sticks or blowing each other up!
What we need to do is maintain our flexibility as a continuing practice throughout our lives.