The Muse and Views

My mom once said to me “You know, I feel like I’ve learnt everything there is to know about myself.”  That thought scared me.  To me, that meant there was a ceiling to my growth, a limit to my potential.  In that moment I vowed never to be in a place where I felt like I knew everything about myself.

You’ve heard that people don’t actually change, right?  Except that we do.  We just may not want to see it, or acknowledge it.  If people don’t change, we think we know them.  If we think we know them, we feel safe, because we think we have them figured out.  We know what their patterns are, their actions, their behaviours.  They’re predictable.  Predictable people don’t change.  But, if we don’t change, we don’t grow and if we don’t grow, what else is there for us to do except to pass on?

I think my vow to never be in a place where I had reached my potential wasn’t really all that necessary.  Because, really, the day I stop growing will be the day that I die.  It’s impossible to go through life without becoming something we weren’t in the previous moment.  And none of us can go backwards, we can only go forwards.  Therefore, we can never shrink, we can only grow.  Yet growth may be in one direction versus another, because where we feel we’ve reached our potential, we’ve automatically put a limit on ourselves as to how far we can go.

We’ll never be the same person twice.  We can never recreate the same circumstances unless in a controlled environment, and yet, if we’re in a controlled environment, there is a limit to what we can learn.  There are a finite number of things that can happen.  That’s what’s exciting about life.  It’s uncontrolled.  We are not in control.  And because of that, we must always grow and adapt to what’s happening around us.

I’ll never be in a place where growth isn’t an option.  At least not until I leave this earth.  Growth is inevitable.  It’s another fundamental truth to life.  Whoever you think I am today, know that I’ve already found new ways and directions to grow and whoever you were in that moment, you’ve grown beyond that too.