At Your Pace
Preface
The simple fact is, I want to grow at my own pace.
There are a million reasons for adhering to some outside growth plan: money, religion, politics, culture, social acceptance, family, death, etc.
Yet, if I rebel against anything in life, it is the progressive pressure to grow my soul faster than my own ability to enjoy and comprehend every step of the process.
Growth is to change by degrees and comprehending the change.
If there is purpose to life it is this, to gain understanding.
Can one gain true understanding if one is forced to grow at a pace that doesn’t allow time and method for comprehension and development?
What good are the mile markers if one is simply counting them?
To grow at one’s own pace, to choose the growth, to accept the change, and to enjoy the point of it all, is the ultimate, transcendent human experience.
The “Not Enough Time” Trope
For most of my life, I tried to match my personal growth to the rhythm of traditional timetables and programs, as most humans do.
At five you do this, at eight you do this, at 14 you do this, at 16 you do this, at 18 you’re now this, and at 21 and beyond you can do and are this, as if life and learning were somehow connected to hours and days or imposed stages superficially linked to a programmed outline.
Every human organization seems to promote a type of check listing and typecasting, turning humans into slaves of supposed time-tested cultural expectation.
Instead of culture supporting human existence, human existence has turned that notion on its head and humans now support the self-perpetuation of the culture for culture’s sake. Ironically, culture has become a bizarre mastermind plan of its own.
Humans are so willing to give up their sovereignty to mechanistic control to gain and enjoy a counterfeit sense of accomplishment and security, forgetting to relish and enjoy the beautiful growth process from one perspective and position to another.
Why are we in such a hurry to check off the next growth box?
Why do we need to meet culturally identified norms without thought for whether we’ve truly gained something of value or not?
Religious culture, like any other human culture, can turn personal growth into a race against the clock.
Religion, like all human organizational structures, aggrandizes program and ritual above that of personal growth by assuming that physical actions—what a person does—is equal to understanding and spiritual development.
If you just follow the program, you’ll be material for heaven.
Yet, I’ve found the opposite to be true, I followed programs and discovered that my personal joy and understanding is not equal to my desire for the person I hope to be in heaven.
Programming has not sufficiently forced my mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual growth to match the impossibly high meritocratic standards of a culturally derived heaven.
In programs, my heart never caught up with my actions, nor will it if my comprehension is lacking. Heaven, whatever it is, has to be about heart.
The “actions equal comprehension” or “programmed equals redemption,” type of spiritual growth is, in my opinion, fundamentally flawed.
Throughout my university studies I’ve found the same moronic litmus test, using archaic grading programs to measure competency within a subject.
How many students have graduated university to find that their professions require real competency and understanding, not a check the box for an “A” or rubric-based type comprehension.
Reaching for standards of excellence and expectation isn’t inherently bad. But when a timer is used to clock one’s progress toward the assimilation of the standard, one simply ends up with a good grade or a good time, not a true level of comprehension.
Within many cultural structures there is a sort of “not enough time” framework of “grow now or forever pay the consequences of your slothfulness,” as if personal growth is under some time sensitive pressure cooker.
The faster one dutifully complies, the more one is praised for their speedy adaptation.
Natural Cycles & Forcing growth
Certainly, there are aspects of human existence, like natural cycles, that push the “I’m not ready for this” or “I’d like to grow at my own pace and in my own way” boundary, and in some ways, force one to move forward into a new stage of life before one feels completely certain or ready.
All young girls know the inevitability of one’s cycle is out there in an unbeknownst future. Although every girl’s body is different, there is an expectation that at some point in the future she’ll join the ranks of cycling females.
Puberty in every culture is a physical growth point that, ready or not, as a human you’ll encounter the transformation in some form or another.
It’s not so much a deadline, as it is a coming to terms with inevitability.
Like physiological changes from adolescence to adulthood, the inevitability of death also looms uncomfortably in the future for every life force on Earth.
Despite human attempts to thwart or ignore death, there it is, a force of inevitability.
Aging happens. From birth to death, there isn’t a way to stem the tide.
Nature’s cycles, because of their inevitability, force us to grow in one way or another. Nature’s cycles force change. But does it control growth?
We are a part of nature, we grow physically on its timetable. But do we grow emotionally or spiritually on demand?
This physical phenomenon of ever-moving toward inevitability begs the question, if nature forces change to take place, shouldn’t humans force emotional and spiritual growth to meet the demands of physical change?
Part of being human is changing and like a timer ticking toward an end, our time will be up. Shouldn’t the certain uncertainty necessitate a high degree of haste and rush?
If one has only so much time, and that time cannot be quantified equally, isn’t that cause enough to make each moment count and to push oneself to grow as quickly as possible?
At Your Pace
As a member of the human family, I recognize the part I play in perpetuating the species. I also comprehend the necessity for the implementation of cultural structures for survival’s, and even thriving’s, sake.
However, I can also distinguish through both observation and experience that humans, although a product of nature, have the capacity for much more than robotic and instinctual inclinations of survival, even amidst surviving.
My personal growth rebellion and frustration is not with natural cycles, nor with human constructs that enhance the human family’s capacity to survive.
Instead, my frustration lies in the haphazard and ever-changing agendas and programs promoted as necessary for growth, when in fact, they are not.
Perpetuating nature is nature’s work. How it does this is or why is outside of my conceptual understanding.
I’m beyond bored bumping around in culturally defined, human concoctions of meritocratic nonsense.
Change may be natures, but growth is mine and I choose to slow the f**k down.
There is time enough outside of the constant noise and expectation of human social and cultural organization to explore, observe, and comprehend.
Nature’s rhythms, although slightly more predictable than human nonsense, are integral and functional, yet slow enough to teach one to notice the opening of the petals, the steady flow of brook and river, and the shifts and shapes of the stars and moon.
The older I get, the less patience I have for so-called time-tested traditions of the ironically self-declared, wisdom of humans.
Conclusion
Growth, real growth, the kind that leads to greater comprehension and understanding of what is right, real, and good, cannot be sped up, meritocratically based, or force-fed through programming.
Growth is the result of a desire for more that compels one to comprehend, consume, and assimilate.
Understanding and comprehension materialize when one is both capable of and fully ripe to embrace what one desires, and that can take serious, non-negotiable, and customizable amounts of time.
