Every living thing is growing and becoming. Not because it’s ambitious. Because it’s alive.
The oak tree starts as an acorn, something wildly unlike what it eventually becomes. We humans start as zygotes. A single cell formed by the fusion of egg and sperm. Also wildly unlike what we become. And, of course, there is the catepillar.
Life itself is a process of growing and becoming. We grow physically for a time. We get taller, stronger, leaner, fuller. But that process ends. Bones settle. Hormones shift. Physical development more or less completes its arc by our mid-twenties, when the oven dings on the adolescent brain, signalling that it is, finally, fully cooked.
But that's not the end of the full process, just one chapter. We're still meant to grow and become.
Emotional growth. Psychological growth. Spiritual growth. These are lifelong. Or at least, they’re supposed to be.
When that kind of growth gets interrupted, we feel it. We might not have words for it, but our system starts to speak up. Restlessness. Numbness. Low-grade sadness. A relationship stuck in the same fight on repeat. A subtle (or not so subtle) sense that something in us has gone flat.
We might call it burnout. Or depression. Sometimes we just call it being tired all the time.
But often, what’s really happening is this: Evolution, the process of growing and becoming, has gotten stuck. It wants to continue to unfold. But something’s in the way.
We tend to feel this stuckness and think something's wrong, or maybe what we’re doing is wrong. But that's not necessarily it. It just means we’ve outgrown our situation. Our role, our rhythm, our present way of being. And our soul knows it.
That can be terrifying. But it’s also a sign of hope. Because what looks like falling apart is often the first stage of falling into something better, something new. Growth is rarely graceful. It’s disruptive by nature. Sometimes it hurts. But this kind of growth is also how we become wildly unlike what we started as. Something we need to become.
This process of getting unstuck, and freeing ourselves up to grow and become, doesn't have to complicated (although we can make it complicated). You don’t need to overhaul everything. You don’t need a vision board or a five-year plan (unless you dig that kind of thing). You just have to be willing to listen. To stay honest. To take the next real step, even if it's a small one.
Because the ache you feel - the sense that there’s more to this life, more to you - isn’t a problem to fix. It’s a sign that you're alive. It’s an invitation to grow. And become.
And by the way, I have no idea what you're becoming. What any of us are becoming. What any of this [gestures in the general direction of everything] is becoming.
But it's going to be better.