Growth is a worthwhile challenge. There's a couple paths when contemplating growth: one path is to do the work to grow and the other path is stagnation; you can expand yourself or you can remain the same. Let's look at this from the perspective of a single day. We can wake up in the morning and do roughly the same activities we did the day before, or the last week before, month before, year before, decade before... Or! We can develop new habits that improve our process like having an apple or berries for breakfast instead of toast or oatmeal, or go take that run or do some pushups, or something else that gets you going in the morning.
Of course these examples reflect on physical growth: to eat well and work out often enough. There's so much more to do in life than to have a nice body. I find there is an overwhelming number of people suggesting what to do with the time that we have here. To cut through the noise I typically apply the question of "Will doing this improve my overall life energy?" to whatever advice I receive, and when I get a yes, it's good advice! Some of the examples for how to improve your overall life energy are not immediately apparent and I will illustrate a few here:
- Eating an apple instead of toast will give you a steady supply of insulin instead of a spike in blood sugar like carbs without fiber (bread and starches). So, although the toast might immediately make us feel energized, it also makes us crash in the near future, and therefore hungry again, which means spending more of the total energy we have for the day toward digesting, instead of spending that energy being productive, laughing or playing.
- Processing how we feel emotionally instead of ignoring or covering things up with addictions. Although the process of thinking through and releasing the past can be draining, it is worthwhile because these things do not disappear from our psyche. We can see this pretty clearly when traumatic events happen in our lives. It tends to reopen old wounds that have not healed and instead were patched with scar tissue made from emotional eating, drugs like unhealthy affection (note that healthy loving attitudes are not discouraged here, but abandoning yourself for someone else's benefit certainly is), or distraction like television, overworking, or worrying about other people's problems instead of your own.
- Doing activities that ignite your passion. This one is by far my favorite! It is literally like those experiments they have out there where they try to create perpetual motion or something that can output more energy than it takes into the process. An example of a perpetual motion device would be a car you put gas into a single time and it never stopped running because it was able to efficiently reuse the energy it is expending to keep the car running even after the car runs out of gas. Passion is like this! The more we put into it the faster it has us moving and then we just start running and afterwards you're flying and you don't even remember leaving the ground.
Now you can of course ignore this advice, but please consider what you're doing when you choose stagnation over growth. Nobody wants to be a pool full of algae, which is nature's example of stagnation. Everybody wants to be the rushing waterfall, the crashing waves, and the stream full of life. You don't have to take my world for it (pun intended), nature already shows us what our patterns are creating. Evolve or die.
"As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection." - Darwin
We are entering a new age of peace, freedom, and equality. It's always the darkest part of the night before the sun comes up.