What Is The Key To Personal Growth In Life?
The answer can be found in trees.
I was walking around the neighborhood park this morning and for once, something that is rather unattractive caught my attention. This is a site I walk past daily, and it looks like a natural fixture. At least, that is my impression. If it stood out, it would have caught my attention, isn’t it?
As I happen to awestruck by what I saw, I paused. My eyeballs ran from top to bottom and left to right. I was trying to figure out what caught my attention exactly. As I try to get my brains cranking, the answer started coming to me.
It has to do with the lamppost in the foreground, and the trees in the background. Then as with an unstructured choreography, I was able to take away the lamppost, allowing the trees to appear first. Then I did the reverse. All in my mind.
I was trying to figure out what this is telling me. And one thing led to another. Just so suddenly, 2 words came into my mind. The first one was “Structure”, and the second one was “Personal Growth”. I did not force that “why” from my mind. I wanted to have it come to me.
I quickly jotted down the 2 words in my smartphone’s notepad. When I was done and have my smartphone safely deposited into my pockets — The connectors came to me. Just like that. They come in the form of inquisition.
“Just look at the height of the tree. Then look at the height of the lamppost.”
I didn’t fight back. I did exactly as my mind instructed. And then another thought bubble came to me.
“Imagine the height we can grow to when we are unconstrainted.”
I thought that sounded really beautiful. Then I started a hijack by initiating thoughts of my own instead of letting my mind talk. I remember thinking how true that sounded.
When people tell us what to do, we stop growing. When we are left alone to explore, we tend to find things that are interesting to us. We grow unique perspectives too.
I reached for my phone again, typing down my thoughts. All this while as an elderly was staring at me wondering if I am an idiot and if I should be in a mental hospital. It didn’t bother me. I wanted to record my thoughts.
As I was running late for a morning Zoom conference, I made my exit from the site I was rooted deeply for the past 10 minutes. On my way home, a storm broke out in my mind. I kept thinking about “Personal Growth” and how does it manifest itself into our behaviors.
And then, I got it. I rushed to my desk and grabbed a Post-It note to scribble down my seemingly disparate points. I imagined a spectrum that is governed by 2 extremes; one end is structure and one end is freedom.
“Structure” is a result of synthesizing what we do. We first start out working hard and then as we do more, we run into a lack of time. Organizing our day through calendars and Post-It notes is a process we derive to help us get our work done. That result is “structure”.
“Personal growth” is a result of unrestraint exploration. Our minds open up when we travel to places we have never been and be exposed to cultures and ways we have never seen. It sparks curiosity.
And it comes from our courage to explore the novel. The result is stretching the edge of our mental horizons we had yesterday. It comes from the freedom to do what we feel like doing at that moment.
And this is how I think about “Personal Growth”.
What about you?
Happy Daydreaming Friends,
Aldric
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As a content contributor, I write my observations from daily life and my business exposure.
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