Growing Up and Still Growing UP..............

When do you know when you've grown up? Is there a magic age? A mysterious rite of passage and once you've stepped through the myriad of milestones you reach a pinnacle where you find yourself all grown up?

The obvious tell-tale sign is when you stop physically growing in adolescence, but at that point, you're just starting to struggle with moral and value issues and cultivating that path. There may be a shift in thinking at a deeper more complicated level, but there is still so much more to learn before there is a feeling of being grown up. After all, isn't learning and understanding what growing up is all about? If that's the case, it appears that we are never all done growing up.

Maslow seeks to encapsulate his theory in a pyramid, where the top is a point in our lives when we can seek self-actualization. Maslow describes self-actualization as a person's need to be and to do that which the person was "born to do." The process is somewhat like the growing up process...............

"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write." These needs make themselves felt in signs of restlessness. The person feels on edge, tense, lacking something, in short, restless. If a person is hungry, unsafe, not loved or accepted, or lacking self-esteem, it is very easy to know what the person is restless about. It is not always clear what a person wants when there is a need for self-actualization.

The process of attaining a higher level of actualization seems to me a lifelong one.............with undulating peaks and valleys.........personal stops and starts all the while cultivating self-knowledge. There are days when we know exactly what we want, and then there are days when it's not clear at all. There are also days when you feel a sense of happiness and contentment that is generated from within yourself. And, then there are the days when you question every move you make.

Self-actualization is a fleeting feeling at best, isn't it?

You could be on a path that seems so right, and then you're thrown a curve ball, be it a tragedy or new learning that alters your aim for whatever reason............there are so many cause and effect moments in life. I guess it's how you approach the scenario..............but as soon as you alter your course, you are on a path of new learning. It's all a part of growing up. New learning continues the growing up process..............

Henri Nouwen wrote in his book The Road to Daybreak, a spiritual journal he wrote during his year living in the L'Arche community in France, about his encounters with friends and family. It was a truly introspective look at his need for approval and recognition; that for whatever reason he needed to know and be told that his vocation and call to become a Catholic priest was fully understood by the important people in his life. However, it was clear reading his written contemplative thoughts that he would never feel a complete sense of this desire and that he had to shift his own thinking to realize that his confidence in the path that he chose must come from within. It was he who had to be fully approving and comfortable in accepting the gifts that God gave him and the path that God chose for him even if it wasn't going to be the one he had a yearning for. His path was to move away from a life of academia and independence to a communal setting living with people who had serious disabilities and were dependent on their caregivers. A huge step for Nouwen in growing up and becoming independent of the need for others to understand his personal gifts and goals. He was a middle aged man when this maturing shift occured.

Sometimes one reads something that seems to resonate in such a timely way that it makes you wonder about the prescience of it. For years, I have struggled against the tide, trying to restructure my career in a manner that would allow me to move ahead financially and with recognition. I have met with several individuals who have the capacity to place me in "prestigious" positions within the government I work for. They have been interesting meetings, and often cover a lot of ground, but I have never been able to encapsulate for them just exactly where I would fit. And for various reasons, these attempts have stalled. What I have come to realize, thanks to Henri Nouwen, is that I have been given gifts that don't necessarily fit into the normal square pegs....... and that recognition and approval must come from me.

I need to be comfortable in my own fit. Self-satisfaction and self-actualization go hand in hand.......... the hunger both Maslow and Nouwen write about.........Maslow's theoretical concepts and Nouwen's personal reflections .......... have helped me realize that I need no one to tell me if I'm on the right path or not, or if the path I have chosen lives up to anyone else's expectations. Instead, I just need to chill out and accept that my destiny and perhaps my personal career legacy will be more fulfilling if I stop going against the tide.



Counselling in the frontlines, working with individuals with multiple needs, visiting clients in their homes and offering my open ear, advocating, supporting, challenging, confronting, teaching, caring and motivating.................these are the gifts I can offer to others.

And the gifts they give me? Moments of grace that a rare few will ever experience.

I feel like I've just made a step closer to growing up. Anyone wanna meet outside to play kick the can with me? I'm allowed out until the streetlights come on.



To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” Henri Bergson