June 11th 2023: Outgrowing
Outgrowing
Does it count if the person they miss isn’t actually me?
- Anita Kelly
You cannot assume a self-identity that you have not mentally adopted.
- Dele Ola
It’s so hard to write a new story when you do everything by the book.
- Curtis Tyrone Jones
Don’t just be yourself, evolve yourself.
- Vikram Verma
MAKE A DIFFERENCE
First Reading
A challenge arises when we make something over a long period of time. As we evolve — as we add experiences, impressions, memories, deepening knowledge and self-knowledge to the combinatorial pool from which all creative work springs — what we make evolves accordingly; it must, if we are living widely and wisely enough. Eventually, the name we once chose for it begins to feel not like a choice but like a constraint, an ill-fitting corset ribbed with the ossified sensibility of a former self. Joan Didion may be right that “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” but we are also well advised to welcome with a largehearted embrace the blooming possibilities within us — the people we are in the ongoing course of becoming, the people we will have been when our atoms give way to our afterglow.
Maria Popova, The Marginalian
Second Reading
It takes courage and humility to acknowledge that one's previous position may have been flawed and to embrace the change that comes with growth. The beauty of human intellect lies in its capacity to evolve. Those who embrace change are destined to become the architects of progress”
Dr. Lucas D. Shallua
Third Reading
You are not intended to spend this life squeezed and choked and squashed in a vise of Other People’s design, or values that aren’t your own, or an outdated world view; no, you were made for discernment, cultivation, and expansion.
Until you realize that the internal forces that guide you will evolve as you do, and that you have within you the power to shift and adapt them so that they better meet your needs at various points in your life, trying to exist under the constraints of anything that doesn’t fit will be a significant source of inner conflict. But when you understand that you are free to live by your rules … you also realize that you can rewrite them as needed. You can create a [you] that is tailor-made.