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The Myth of Personal Growth

Bill Long

For as long as I can remember, the root metaphor or image of life that was always pressed upon me was "growth." I grew physically as a child, and that growth was affirmed by doting aunts with words like, "My, how you have grown!" I was told I needed to grow intellectually in order to be ready for the challenges of life. When I became interested in religious life in my late teens, I was urged to "grow spiritually." Once I began making some money everyone seemed to be urging me to grow financially. Nature's recurrent efflorescence added mute but powerful confirmation to the aptness of this root metaphor to describe life. Growth was good. It was to be desired. It was to be a prominent piece of mental furniture as I approached life each day.

But, the more I talk to people in the middle days of their lives, the more I see that the quest motivating them is not so much to "grow" as to "recover" or "rediscover" what they once were or who they essentially are. A case in point arose in a conversation with a 55 year-old male friend, a writer and philosopher, who confessed to me that his philosophical yearnings of late are really nothing more than his desire to recapture the heart of the 10 year-old boy who stood looking into the radiant light of a New Mexico night sky and wondered what was beyond the stars. He speaks eloquently and with feeling today about the 3rd century Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus, but his love for Plotinus flows from the heart of a child.

So it is with me. As I live life at 52 and divide my past into various segments and chapters, I am struck by how much I want to recapture my heart as I was more than 30 years ago. It is as if there is a straight shot from 1971 to today, and I so much want to talk to the Bill of those days to recapture his (my) energy, vision, hope and orientation. If there is any root metaphor that captures my current questing it is that of "deepening." I seek to tell the Bill of 1971 that his heart was so good and remains so good, but that it is deepened through language, through love, through unsolicited and incredible pain and through unexpected grace.

Some might disagree and say that their past is what they left behind when they finished therapy or when they escaped from the chains that confined them. Indeed, I am not an advocate of interminable tracing of each step from our past as if each is another Station of our private Cross. But it is a plea to recognize that our strength for the rest of our days rests on our ability to recognize that there probably was a time, a memory, a task, a love from our deep past that needs to be rekindled. That, rather than an elusive quest for "growth," is what brings joy to my life.