Growing

(conclusion)

There is no other way for life but to grow. Growing is the basic movement of life. An acorn grows into a giant oak tree. A pup grows into a dog. A caterpillar grows into a butterfly. An infant grows into an adult human being. It is always a beautiful process, where miracles take place in every growth. No one of us can see the acorn from where the giant oak has grown, any more than a pup from a dog. A caterpillar disappears completely when the butterfly it has become flaps its wings. Likewise, we grown-ups cannot anymore see the baby we were used to be.

Neale Donald Walsch, author of the Conversations with God series, has a striking way of seeing growth and change: All change is change for the better. There is no such thing as change for the worse. As we change, everything becomes better, no matter how worse you find it. Our reasoning limits us to understand this natural process. We have to let go of our control over this organic change. Nothing is in regression. Our lives are always propelled to improve and to evolve.

But there is always an unprecedented thing in the process of growing. We often think that growth is about changing size or shape, or years adding up, or developing new skills. We often see growth us something chaotic, like an overnight big bang when heavenly things appear in an instant. Or something that gained by chance, a gamble between fortune and misfortune appearing one after the other. Worse, we see threat instead of growth, for the process of growth is a process of change that could shake the foundations of our comfort zones. Misunderstanding growth becomes a good reason to stop growing. We cocoon ourselves with heaps of justifications on why we should stay the way we are. We stagnate in this flowing movement, even if we bear this fervent need to change. We feel clueless and troubled, figuring out the best ways to get past this inert stage.

Being stuck in some place of our growth is, fortunately, a big part of growing. The life in an acorn is stuck, waiting for the perfect timing when the soil buries it and begin to germinate. A pup was once an embryo, just like us humans, "stuck" inside its mother's womb. A caterpillar sleeps into a pupa, sluggish little creature hanging in some leaf, unflustered by any kinds of weather. We might find this form of inaction as some waste of time, yet there is more to it than just inactivity. Amid a fast-paced world where changes flip in a blink of an eye, we must see the value of serenity of nondoing more than doing. We feel anxious of not acting on something, or perhaps unconcerned of our own growth while we are breathing our jammed lives, though this pause has something to bring us. This is the hiatus of our souls bringing the awareness of being, taking more deepened silence and rest to nurture the subtleness of our inner Love.

Wherever we are in our lives now, we are incubating ourselves perfectly, a stage of growing we are yet to discover as the most vital. To observe again how our beings become a being is indeed growing itself. It inevitably leads to the process, and meeting again in this endless spiral of change. Like that of a nautilus, whose body outgrows the space of the chamber inside its shell. It creates a more spacious one where it could fit and begin again, and the chamber it has left becomes part of its growing shell structure. Likewise, the being within us is a nautilus in the space of our consciousness, always expanding. Outgrowing the stagnant chamber that made us stuck has pushed us beyond our limits, and the new dimension we have found allows our being to become more than what we are used to. Loving our beings and sharing abundant Love make us grow more; indeed these three natural steps transcend our deeper sentience of Love.

An insight had once crossed my friend's mind. She thought it from an image to an idea to a feeling, something she found vague but profoundly simple: being with someone, sharing with someone, growing with someone. Her insights inspired me, as they oftentimes happen, of another insight. These three states are not separate with each other, but part of a continuum where the essence of Love realizes itself. They can be both states and stages, appearing as ascending steps towards understanding Love. And more than having another person, this "someone" is no one else but ourselves. Love has come to its full circle, when being, sharing, and growing the Love within finally awakens us.