A month ago, in a conversation with my sister, she indicated the following.
I have a thing for history and preserving the past š The record keeper in me.
She said these words because she is our family archivist. She enjoys maintaining photos of our past but also discovering things in our past that some of us might not be aware of. Some examples of this might be discovering our family lineage or discovering something that our dad worked on (i.e. the Red River Floodway in Manitoba) when he was younger.
For some reason though, her words kept tugging on me, almost as though my intuition was telling me there was something important about them.
At the same time though, Iāve been redesigning my website, importing old posts back onto it, and going back to try to fix any importing errors in them (which Iām still in the process of doing).
What Iāve already noted as being revealing in this process is how much I became aware of how much I was radically changing over time. In effect, I often beat myself up that I wasnāt reaching the goal or destination of fully expressing myself in the way I wanted to do so, yet I was still expressing myself in ways that showed how much I was changing.
To put this another way, I was courageously trying to express myself in ways that I often couldnāt logically articulate because I still didnāt fully understand who I was becoming. Yet I still stepped beyond and off the edge of my existing worldview to try to intuitively express myself in an emotional way, expressing what I was feeling at the time.
What this made me realize this morning is that growth and development require reflecting upon the past to see how we were previously looking to the future. In doing so, it collectively helps us to understand who we are fully becoming in the present.
In effect, reflecting upon the past is not enough. Nor is just looking to the future. They both have to be done in combination. This relates to something Steve Jobs said.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
Steve Jobs
To emphasize this even more so, let me explain it in a different way.
To grow and develop, one needs to step beyond who they think and believe they are. This is a daily practice of trying to articulate who you feel you are wanting to become without fully knowing who you are becoming as of yet.
Often this entails articulating what you feel you need in your life that relates to values you want to embody.
Yet in that present moment of articulation, one will often feel like they are off the edge of the known world, exploring a newer, unknown one that they can barely comprehend. Actually so much so, that they may feel lost within it.
They are lost because this newer unknown world is a larger worldview they are exploring. So they actually have to lose themselves to find themselves.
Not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves.
Henry David Thoreau
But to be able to map it and understand it, you have to actually step into the unknown of it and explore it, experiencing it like a traveller exploring a new world.
But you canāt just experience it. You actually have to try to articulate the experience, almost like youāre a storyteller describing your journey into this new world, even though it may be feel impossible to do so.
Yet in doing so, in repeatedly trying to express the experience of stepping into this unknown, you are mapping it out and make it known.
Letting my experience carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience.
Carl Rogers
So again, to fully map out a newer worldview and a newer state of being for yourself, which represents your growth and development, you continually have to step beyond who you think and believe you are to discover who you truly are.
But the discovery of oneās larger sense of Self only comes from reflecting upon your exploration, not from the exploration itself, even though the exploration is an essential part of the overall process itself.
Thatās because your reflection is an act of navigation, both in terms of navigating between the newer places youāve explored, thus understanding how they relate to one another, but also in terms of navigating between your old world(view) and newer, emerging one as a whole.
All said and done, this has been a very enlightening experience of reflection for myself, especially for someone who is usually just future-focused on creatively releasing potentials and possibilities. Itās taught me that getting to that future and releasing oneās potential requires continually reflecting upon your past actions of exploring your future self.
At the same time though, this also makes it evident why most people donāt continue to grow and develop much once they become an āadult.ā Itās because they often reach a point in their lives where they stop looking forward to exploring newer experiences, because they may feel that they are too uncertain and risky now, and instead just focus on nostalgically protecting and defending their past which defines their present belief of who they are.
Yet in doing so, their old beliefs of themselves are actually standing in the way of newer experiences and of who they can still potentially become. In effect, itās almost as though these old beliefs act like a chasm or moat at the edge of their worldview. It both protects them from having to deal with the unknown (ie āHere be dragonsā) but also prevents them from expanding their worldview at the same time.
To navigate well through midlife and beyond is not to build stronger armor but to learn when to lower our heartās drawbridge, allowing ourselves to be truly seen and to behold the world in all its stunning mystery and wonder.
Steven Morris
This is another paradox of growth and development. It is not about pushing ourselves forward into the unknown which feels like someone pushing you off a cliff or into a chasm. It is more about recognizing and becoming aware of how we are often already being pulled into playfully and curiously exploring the unknown without fully realizing it yet.
This again embodies what creativity means to me when applied to oneās self. It is about discovering something that has already been there all along but you just werenāt aware of it.