age not invariable predictor of maturity
At the end of his career, veteran hockey enforcer Marty McSorley took an ill-advised swing with his stick and struck fellow enforcer (and far less illustrious player) Donald Brashear in the head. If you look at the video, it appears that McSorley might have been aiming at Brashear's shoulder, as McSorley claimed, but it was a pretty stupid act, however one looks at it. Brashear recovered and resumed playing. Fairly or not, that one impulsive act pretty much ended McSorley's career.
I think of McSorley when I, no longer young, do dumb things--do things that should be beneath my maturity. It makes me think of the question: Which is the greater contributor to maturity, age (accumulated experience) or proximity to death? More and more, I think it's the latter. For one thing, simply having maintained a metabolism for X years does not bequeath one anything. I might extend this principle to claims of having performed a certain job for a number of years, as if that lends authority to a person. It very well might, but it very much depends on the individual.
That age is not an invariable predictor of maturity is consistent with my experience of those young people who seem mature beyond their years--the "old souls".
Hundreds of millions of our fellow travelers grow up in societies in which death is an ever-present shadow. In wealthy nations, we can kind of tuck the subject away in the desk drawer. While some of us (I among them) postpone cozying up to our common destination for a pretty long time, reality inevitably intrudes. Pretty soon, you lose parents, and start losing contemporaries, maybe develop chronic health problems. The evidence achieves a weight of non-deniability.
It's at this point where courage and integrity and all those qualities you were able to name and sort of able to describe become like: "Oh. That's what courage is." I stand in utmost admiration of those persons, of any age, who can come to terms with our common fate with equanimity and maybe even a positive attitude.
