The disorientation of growth_16.1
A piece about progress
Expectations, an inaccessible part of a novel title written by someone cool but dead? Expectations, those heightened emotions we have before a great holiday or a big meeting? Expectations, what I hope to achieve, or be, or do, or sometimes say? Expectations: the unwritten, unspoken, uninvestigated fungus fingering their way slowly through our emotions, hearts and minds while sprouting all shorts of dark and dangerous shapes we mostly choose to ignore.
Question: Who would have thought that growth could be disorientating? Hard even. Horrible on its worst day and sometimes just flat-out depressing. Not this guy. Nope, definitely not this guy. And so yes, I am surprised to say it, but growth is hard. Let me explain with three short stories:
When I was a child I suffered from growing pains. They tore into my legs night after night until I had no choice but to scream. I can still remember it, a cruel cross between a calf cramp and hard-earned lactic acid buildup. I squirmed long into the night, writhing in my childhood bed with nothing but a white ceiling for comfort trying to pass the seconds one at a time. And in those moments, those irrational struggles for momentary survival there was absolutely nothing you could have said to me that would have made my growth easier. I expected linear and smooth, tall and straight, six foot six and blond-haired like my cousin ten years my senior, and yet I was being schooled by the chaos and pain of growth probably for the first time.
Our third son is seven months and ten days old. He woke up at four am this morning with a grrrrrrr. He’s a smart kid like his mom and on an exponential learning curve and so sitting squashed into his bumbo chair seems to be something he cannot reconcile with his wants. He’s got a stationary post in life now while all others move freely. I think it grates him. His mind craves what he does not have and that burning hunger for movement constantly bumps up against his brain like a headache. Those around him suffer along with him thanks to what comes out of his mouth, an almost endless moan that is sending me into a mild form of insanity because of how relentless it is. But we, like Sam, are obviously growing in a very beautiful way and yet still I am finding it so hard?
Finally, we’re in the process of rescuing our block of flats. For a long time, some say twelve years, it has been sorely neglected. As long as I have lived there paint hung from the walls like scabs. Water dripped liberally through the entrance. Our ceiling was collapsing and human feces waltzed through common areas along with criminals sometimes on a weekly basis. But piece by piece, day by day, we’ve fought together for growth. This week we began the final stage of our transformation and started to remove the scabs of shame that cloak our forsaken walls (sorry, I can’t help but be dramatic, it has been too terrible for words living in such a mess). Yes! We’re licking our walls with a delicious coat of new, white paint and that’s tangible growth right there in front of me of the most obvious kind. Everyone knows one of the easiest ways to make something drab and horrible shine is to paint it, right? But surprise of all surprises, it’s hard. Painters are a noisy bunch and right now we have a low tolerance for that, especially around sleep times. And alarms are set off when they should be. And my instruction and payment and crisis management are constantly needed and so I find myself pulling out the dwindling hair on my forehead and spinning in the swirl of all this improvement.
I suppose the point is pretty simple to see. Growth cost. It takes stretching and changing and adjustment. Rethinking all those old, dead habits. And yet despite a short lifetime of mining out the hidden possibilities of manhandling my expectations so I can manage my emotions at times like this I still find the juxatposition disorienting. I still don’t expect growth to come with pain. Still I seem stuck wanting to live my life in endless hunger for a better that is easy. Progress with any cost. The more that Lotto billions offer and great improvement without any investment.
I am struggling to find my place in the world. I know I can slide easily back into a great, well-paid corporate job. I am talented, smart, and have world-class experience, and yet the power of stories burns in me. Everywhere I look I see decay that needs hopes touch. But I am stuck, stuck defining myself, stuck with the limits of my own potential and past, stuck by where to point my gifts and when to pull the trigger and if that will make any difference at all…
In the clumsy mess of it all, my life, my city, my nation, and the world, I take great comfort in the fact that growth is disorientated and that is because I feel disorientated so deeply and therefore must be choosing to grow. I hope it is upwards and towards love and service of others because I think that is a good thing? Sure, I could shrink back, settle. Reduce the pain in a second and plant myself in a little pot so my family and friends could eat the fruit of my life but I think this moment in history requires more of us. The two hundred humans who pass by the front of my home carrying black bags of scraps they steal and salvage for food and drugs require more. The people in Mel’s community require more. Kids in schools, people in my city struggling under debt, politicians, any humans living through 2020s require more...? Heck, I require lots more!
Thankfully I am utterly convinced of my own failing and the limits of my very small wheelhouse as you are well aware so feel absolutely no inclination to save them all. But I do feel deep down in my soul that love and growth are intertwined. And to settle and be small is to choose not to serve those who I am possibly destined to provide a bit of shade for and in the simplicity of the analogy I find my purpose. I think inside the quiet caverns of my heart there is something that whispers that it just seems unfair of me to stay small and so on my best days I submit to the slow, painful process of pushing upwards slowly.
