growth

All relationships have ups and downs. Romantic fantasy often nurtures the belief that difficulties and down times are an indication of a lack of love rather than part of the process. In actuality, true love thrives of the difficulties. The foundation of such love is the assumption that we want to grow and expand, to become more fully ourselves. There is no change that does not bring with it a feeling of challenge and loss. When we experience true love it may feel as though our lives are in danger; we may feel threatened.

... In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole. Also, because it's harder to be magnanimous when you're in your twenties, I think, and so that's why I'd like to remind you of it. You're generally less humble in that decade than you'll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and uncertainty and fear. You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery.

Good laughter, or even a smile. It makes everything grow. It makes people Love you.

Everyday my life gets better and better. I make loving, life affirming choices daily to create an amazing life.

That is the thing about films. They don't change. You change. The immutability of the film (or a book or a painting or a piece of music) is something to measure yourself against. That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to it, and it shows you who you are now, each time a little different.

His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a moment, the turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of accident, had thrust into the blazing heat of him. His mind picked out in white living brightness these pinpoints of experience and the ghostliness of all things else became more awful because of them. So many of the sensations that returned to open haunting vistas of fantasy and imagining had been caught from a whirling landscape through the windows of the train.And it was this that awed him _ the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time. There was one moment of timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move. It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute. Or like those motion-pictures that describe the movements of a swimmer making a dive, or a horse taking a hedge _ movement is petrified suddenly in mid-air, the inexorable completion of an act is arrested. Then, completing its parabola, the suspended body plops down into the pool. Only, these images that burnt in him existed without beginning or ending, without the essential structure of time. Fixed in no-time, the slattern vanished, fixed, without a moment of transition.His sense of unreality came from time and movement, from imagining the woman, when the train had passed, as walking back into the house, lifting a kettle from the hearth embers. Thus life turned shadow, the living lights went ghost again. The boy among the calves. Where later? Where now?I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me, which, having for me no existence save that which I gave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a cumulation of what I have been becoming. Why here? Why there? Why now? Why then?The fusion of the two strong egotisms, Eliza__ inbrooding and Gant__ expanding outward, made of him a fanatical zealot in the religion of Chance. Beyond all misuse, waste, pain, tragedy, death, confusion, unswerving necessity was on the rails; not a sparrow fell through the air but that its repercussion acted on his life, and the lonely light that fell upon the viscous and interminable seas at dawn awoke sea-changes washing life to him. The fish swam upward from the depth.

Prune the ill branches so that a tree grows.Prune the dilapidated buildings so that a city flourishes.

You will be perpetually unhappy if you continue to refuse to walk in your calling.

Skills or professionalism is another factor of growth

If I flew for you, you would still be standing.

I have noticed that the solar radiation reflections from rippled privacy windows cause greatly accelerated growth patterns in plants

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just... come out the other side.

The more we focus on who we are in Christ, the less it matters who we were in the past, or even what happened to us.

Am I a storm-waster? For it is within the fury of the very storms within which I cower that I find resources for my growth that are entirely absent on calmer days.

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people's emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body.

If you think that growth means perfection, let me assure you, it does not! You do not need to be perfect; instead, strive to be honest, admit to failures, learn to ask for and to give forgiveness, love and allow yourself to be loved. Accept and even celebrate differences in others; their __o Excuses_ mindsets may look and function a bit differently than yours, but that is okay!

You go through so many changes as a child, then you grow up and discover that none of that stuff mattered, except for the impression it made on your mind.

Good dreams don't have to fade upon waking. We each hold in ourselves the best of all of us, and the worst. Change happens every day. We who go to bed at night are not the we who woke up. The you of tomorrow may not recognize the you of today, but wouldn't it be a shame if you don't recognize who you're going to be?Your mind is powerful. Use it to stretch the edges of yourself, find the loops that keep you in place and introduce something new, or take something out. Change happens every day. It's what separates the animate from the inanimate, the plant from the stone. The moment you stop changing is the moment you stop being alive.All living things grow, but only physically. To be human is to grow mentally, emotionally. You are not the you of yesterday, let alone yesteryear. From the worst of us to the best, each has grown, and each can grow more. The moment you stop growing is the moment you stop exemplifying that which is uniquely human. Change happens every day. When you change, you can change back. You can cut away who you were and start anew, and then do it again in reverse. But when you grow, you build on who you were. You cannot unknow what you make a part of you, what you keep of yourself. There is no going back: only forward. Only upwards. Only outwards.Everything in you is a tool you can wield. We each can create the reason behind everything in our lives. Change happens every day. When you apply a reason for the good in you, the bad in you, you plot a map that your future self will walk. Choice is more than an action in a moment. Choice is an attitude in a lifetime.Change happens every day. Choose to grow.