Do people grow?
That’s not quite as dumb a question as it may sound -- especially for someone like me. I’m 44 years old (45 next month), and well into a phase of life in which I don’t feel like I grow all that much on a day-to-day basis. What changes I do experience are more often, in fact, the opposite of growth: A muscle group that’s unaccountably sore after an activity that used to have no impact, or an inability to remember someone’s name or the title of a book that in the past would have sprung instantly to mind.
It’s all so different from the way it used to be. When I was young – from my earliest years till at least halfway through my twenties -- growth was something I took completely for granted. In grade school I knew that over the course of every summer vacation my classmates would change – either a little or, just as often, radically. People who had been my close friends in May wouldn’t necessarily be so come September. They’d look different by then, and quite possibly act differently too. Everyone changed all the time.
And of course, I did as well. Though I never knew entirely where things were going to go from one year to the next, there was a basic trust that life got better and not worse as it went along -- like a river that broadened, deepened, and grew stronger with each mile that it flowed.
Then… something happened. Somewhere in the second half of my twenties, that river of change slowed down. Life stopped offering new surprises, new dimensions of experience. From one year to the next, both the world and I remained largely the same.
Meanwhile, I started studying other adults and noticing for the first time just how little most of them changed from year to year either. On some level I’d always been aware that at a certain point most people leveled out in this regard. But somehow I’d never imagined that I would ever be joining this company myself. After all, I was different. Even if other people didn't keep on changing, I certainly would.
Or would I? The deeper I moved into adulthood, and the more I realized that life really wasn’t going to exempt me from aging after all, the more ANGRY I got at being born into a world where growth only went on for a certain – relatively short – period of time. What a gyp! And what a betrayal.
Which gets me back to that question I started out with. The real question, of course, is not "Do people grow?" but rather: "Do they KEEP growing?" In the last years of my drinking, I was starting to fear that the answer to that question might really and truly be “No.”
Then I entered recovery, and heard a different answer. Suddenly people were talking about "growth" all the time -- and not just in the past tense either. Yes, my physical body would continue – more or less -- on its long slow slide to decrepitude; there was nothing the Big Book could do about that. But it turned out that there was another part of me – a more essential part – that could, with proper cultivation, keep growing for the rest of my life, and even beyond.
This growth would not, however, be of the same variety that I'd become used to as a child and a teenager. I would have to collaborate with this growth -- to take part in the process -- in a way I never had to before. This collaboration wouldn't always be fun or easy either. But then, when I looked back objectively at my childhood and teenage years, I had to admit that the changes I'd gone through then were hardly as easy and pain-free as I liked to imagine.
Much of the anger that so many drunks feel toward the world comes, I suspect, in large part from that same essential feeling of outrage that I suffered so strongly in the last years of my drinking: A sense of betrayal at the discovery that the journey of life had ended, and that nothing truly new lay in the future.
Likewise, most of those strange (and, to be honest, rather rare) souls I’ve encountered in recovery who really and truly AREN’T angry at the world anymore are that way because they now know different: They know that true growth really doesn't stop in one’s twenties, or in one’s fifties, or even when one's body is lowered into the ground.
With our assent, it might just go on forever.