As humans we have an inbuilt imperative to grow: a desire to learn, to improve, to gather knowledge, or gain in skill or strength or technique or agility, to somehow be “better” tomorrow than we are today.
We are born with this need, but as children it is easily satisfied: every day is a day of wonderment, from the first moments of beginning to recognise faces and voices, to the discovery of the ability to smile, to crawl, to walk, on through play and school and reading and sport and conversation and holidays and tasting and touching and trying, experimenting. Every day is a new adventure of ice-cream and paddling pools and sandpits and snowballs and slapped wrists and rivers and oceans and animals and plaudits and presents and disappointments, smiles and laughter and tears and pain. New stuff. Learning stuff. Growth.
As children we know about the need to grow. We measure our height…we want to be taller, bigger, better. We accumulate silver and gold stars in our work-books or on classroom charts, visual representations that today we know more than yesterday. Progress. Growth.
And then life gets complicated. The lessons get harder…and we start to fail some of them, more of them. We find out learning is often less about picnics and sunshine and more about wasp stings and broken hearts and failed exams. Sadly some of us don’t learn the lesson that failure also equals growth. We forget or are never taught that life is simply one gigantic empirical experiment and there’s no such thing as a wrong result.
If we are open to it we grow through looking at our failures. We learn that a particular approach in a particular circumstance did not work. It doesn’t mean it wouldn’t ever work, but it means we have more information to work with, we can try something different. Tweak. Try it again. Or indeed spot exactly why it didn’t work and realise it wouldn’t work in any circumstance and try something radically different. We also learn to handle the pain of failure. Let’s not deny it: it does hurt. They’re calling growing pains for a reason. Yes, when you fall off the learning horse, you have to pick yourself up and get back on as soon as you can…but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tend to your bruises and broken bones first.
Part of the learning that comes out of failure, is learning how to handle failure…how to fix those breaks and bruises, whether they’re to flesh and bones, or to finances, or relationships, or simply the ego. We learn how to deal with the pain.
Even if we don’t like it, even if we don’t know it, the truth is that most of us are growing every day.
Like all the human needs, however, it is not sufficient for it to be happening, it is important that we feel that it is happening, that we are conscious of our growth and that our growth is towards the light (ie in the direction we want it to be) rather than away from it. We need to pay attention to how we want to grow, how we are meant to grow. The light as I so blithely put it, is different for everyone. The light is simply what lights the path that lights up your soul, it is what drives and leads your personal growth.
You might be a poet or a philosopher. Equally you might be a dinner lady or a mountain guide or a father or a mechanic or foster sister or a monk or a comedian or a factory worker or a deep sea diver or a painter or a friend or a tea-shop owner or a charity volunteer or a brain surgeon… Indeed you might be a combination of several of those things: what do I know? You might be a foster-parent brain-surgeon who writes poetry and volunteers for the police diving team.
We are who we are, but we can be who we choose to be. Growth, directed growth, real authentic felt growth occurs when we make conscious choices about the directions in which we want to grow. I use the word directions, in the plural, deliberately. None of us is one thing. We are each many things. We are poets and mechanics. Or philosophers and boiler men (I was brought up by one of those) or gardeners and darts players (ditto). Or administrator flamenco dancers. Or cricket-playing business coaches. Or….or….or… the possibilities are endless. You choose.
And that’s the point. To truly feel that we are growing, improving, acquiring knowledge, developing skill, becoming “better” (whatever that means) then we have to decide in what area, in what way, we want that to be so.
It might be growth, but it won’t feel like growth if we’re learning things that don’t interest us, don’t spark our soul. We all remember the lessons in school when all we wanted was for it to be over. We were being taught, but we weren’t learning, we were already planning to forget! If we’re lucky, we also remember the lessons (in school or outside of it – maybe on the allotment or in the kitchen or the artist’s studio or in the hills or beneath the covers with a torch and a book) we remember the lessons when we were learning what we wanted to learn. That was what felt important. That was growing.
There is a saying that it is an ill wind that blows no good. The meaning of this has become a little distorted over time and lost in translation. The origins of it are that it is an extremely ill wind that blows nobody any good, and therefore it follows that most things that are indeed ill winds, may still blow some good along with the rest.
The current situation is an ill wind indeed, we cannot deny the suffering – but for many of us, indeed for most of us, it is not all ill. If we are not working on the stressed-out front line, if we are not (yet) grieving for the loss of those close to us, then what we have is the gift of time. Time to stay home and learn something we’ve always fancied having a go at. We also have the gift of technology which brings us the gift of access to teachers around the world. Whatever it is we might want to learn…embroidery, a musical instrument, astrophysics…there is someone out there online ready to teach us. And we have time in which to learn.
This is a time not to be studious, but just to be curious, to figure out where we want to grow, and then to grow a little in that direction. No pressure, no exams, no continuous professional development, just I wonder if…I wonder what…I wonder how…and the ability and time to go find out.
If you have a passion, follow that. If you don’t, then just play, you might find one.
19th century Flemish art. Egyptian philosophy. Sketching. Making a wormery. Open your mind and who knows where your light might lead.
We spend so much of our growth-energy on developing our professional brains, or our parenting brains, or some other aspect of our identity that is as much ‘should’ as ‘could’. Forced growth is still growth – ask the rhubarb – but as humans we also need to round out our growth. Learning things just for the pleasuring of learning. Quizzes and crosswords and scrabble and card games are such a “thing” because we love having an ability that is purely for its own sake, not for gain, not for advancement. One of my great delights in life are those I did not know… moments. I love the moments when I’ve just discovered a fact, often a fact that I really ought to have known sooner, and I can’t wait to share it. I did not know… is adult code for guess what I learned in school today.
I started this year with a list of things I was going to learn. So far it is still just a list. But what I am learning is to look closely at my garden, at the river, at the trees in the woods and the things that grow beneath them or scuttle or fly among them. I am learning to improve my word-craft. I’m learning to trust my instincts. I’m learning that maybe I am a poet after all. I’m learning that I can see the art in the landscape and that if I keep working with my words and with my camera I will get better at capturing it.
I am also using my gift of time and the gifts of my teachers to work on T’ai chi. This was my ‘wanted to for years’ area of learning. I started classes. I found it…not hard exactly, but complex…deep. Overwhelming. But it also touched me. I knew I wanted to do this, and I know I have the rest of my life to learn how and what it means. So in this gift of space and time, I am working on the basics, going over and over the things we have been taught so far, practicing the bits I get and trusting that where I’m going wrong will be corrected at some point…or accepted as simply being my ‘way’ into the moving meditation. And the bits I’ve forgotten I will need to be taught again. That’s ok, because I know I am better now than I was when class closed, I know will be better when class re-opens. I know I am growing.
And that’s the point.
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