Dear Reader,

In my youth, I was a devotee of the style of book known as the “coming of age story.” I did not consciously reach for these books (which are all too common in children’s literature), but I read them eagerly when I found them. One of my favorites was Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Eagle of the Ninth, in which a young Roman centurion, though crippled in combat, ventures into the dangerous unknown to restore the stolen honor of his father’s legion. Another was Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, in which the pampered heroine is orphaned, deprived of all her riches, and greatly misused by those who ought to care for her—yet discovers the inner strength to press on with bravery and kindness nonetheless.  

Looking back, I realize that my favorite coming-of-age tales have in common the trope of the young person leaving home behind, being rigorously tested, and in the process discovering what he or she is really made of—inevitably, braver, stronger, and more resilient stuff than he or she could ever have imagined. When pushed to their breaking points, these heroes and heroines overcome the odds stacked against them, and having done so, they know two things: who they really are, and that they are really grown up now.

In modern culture, we have some stand-ins for these moments of personal mastery that propel one from childhood into something beyond: things like graduating from high school. Or college. Buying a house. Perhaps marrying, or having children—or finishing another level of graduate school, or getting that next promotion. Yet I have found in myself and in many of my colleagues a nagging sense of doubt: do any of these things really make us grown up? How would we know for sure? We make uneasy jokes about what we’ll do or who we’ll be when we really reach that mythic state. We may have passed by milestones that proved our accomplishments to other people, but we have yet to prove ourselves to ourselves.

The question of what it means to grow up—now, today, in the culture that we are a part of—is what this issue of Fare Forward is about. In “The Right Thing for the Wrong Reason,” Christian Lingner looks at the ways we think and talk about finding meaning—a discourse he suspects is missing a crucial point. Shawn Phillip Cooper writes in “King Arthur’s Youth” about another of my favorite coming-of-age stories, The Sword in the Stone, and the lessons Arthurian tragedy can teach us about choice and consequences. Jake Casale tackles our cultural obsession with looking back to an idealized childhood in “When Nostalgia Grows Up.” And in “Putting a Cap on Eternal Youth,” Griffin Gooch confronts his fear of growing old.

The thread that ties these pieces together is this: that growing up, like life, is something that you absolutely must do yourself—and that you are wholly incapable of doing without a great deal of help from other people. Moreover, it is what you are doing already, one way or another, whether you realize it or not. Good luck.

Fare Forward,
Sarah Clark
Editor-in-Chief