Healing and growth

It occurs to me that we might as well refer to all emotional and even intellectual growth as healing.  My thought process in this is that, as evidenced by your expressed capacity to do better, you were in a suboptimal state before.  Even if you did not know it, even if you were already relatively better than those around you, you were hurt relative to where you could have been.  You were less rather than more.

This is a useful heuristic, especially if you a dd the following thought: growth comes to you; you do not go to it.  We have lines for learning.  You can memorize mathematical tables, and you have not really changed qualitatively when you can go up to 20×20, versus stopping at 12×12.  If you were a psychopath before, you will be a psychopath after.

The growth I am talking about is paradigmatic, it deals with your sense of self, your identity, how you move in the world, what you see (what you allow yourself to see), who you care about and why, and to what extent.  If you think of your current self as existing in a certain equilibrium, you cannot CHOOSE to grow.  You cannot feel feelings for which you are not ready . The best you can do is not reject new feelings because they are new.

As I look at my own healing/growth process, it seems to me that everything good comes to me, and in large measure because I am looking for it, I am waiting for it, I am alert to it.  I watch the fog carefully, tirelessly, to see what emerges.

I write a lot, and in my own self estimation some of what I write is very clear, very good, and very creative.  But I don’t feel myself as a creator, so much as a reporter.  The newsfeed comes from somewhere else. My talent is seeing what is in front of me honestly, which involves a high pain tolerance, and the ability to countenance ambiguity and lack of clarity in large doses for long periods of time.

It also involves accepting, emotionally, that I am incomplete and always will be.  There is no rest for the ready.  Yet, what comes along sometimes is astonishingly beautiful, and worth every ounce of effort.