Zen-ish Thoughts About a Resistance to Growth

Personal growth is hard work, and we are all good at avoiding it.

For all the Type A folks among us, it isn't like you to avoid hard work, right – Isn't that where you expect to show your most special talents, creativity, and perseverance? For all of us who are not Type A, isn't your not Type A -ness defended with your desire to focus on deeper things that mean more – what is deeper and more meaningful than the personal growth that enables and improves everything else?

Yet few of us pursue personal growth as an important skill, as a hobby, or even as a recurring personal interest. Mostly we just take what little growth is forced upon us. With so few models for such an uncommon pursuit, many of us who try in earnest nonetheless get caught up in superficial psycho-babble that makes the very idea of personal growth seem like neurotic nonsense. All of us actively miss many chances to grow when challenges give us exceptional opportunities to explore and improve ourselves. Why don't we take those opportunities as gifts, even if we must be greatly discomforted by them at the same time? That's just paying the bill and still not getting the goods.

Why are we so bad at and avoidant about personal growth?

1. Relative to the human mind's perceptual, emotional, and cognitive abilities, the human mind itself is super-complex, so it's a tough subject under any conditions.
2. The mind obscures its own reasons and methods to protect us emotionally. This is evident in the limitations across psychiatry and all forms of counseling, as well as in daily life. It is true when we inspect others (despite knowing little about their inner experience), and it is paradoxically true when we try to inspect our very own selves, when we have theoretical acces to everything, yet remain in the dark about so much.
3. Personal growth is a profound form of change. Change can imply that circumstances have changed, and thus so should our responses, or that we have been wrong and need to correct ourselves. For some reason, most of us find the latter horrifying, even though it is:
   • Commonplace
   • Inescapable
   • A typical pre-condition of learning, and we all think it's good when we learn something

Regarding 1 and 2, some among us do research to reduce the fog. Some of us do our best to help others reduce their personal fog. Some of us genuinely work on our own fog, often, and to good effect. All of us come up short by degrees because the task itself is inherently very hard. We should be mindful of this, and therefore both persistent and humble about self-exploration, and kindly when we think someone else's self-exploration has come up lacking.

But it's number 3 which in practice limits us long before we get to the harder problems posed by 1 and 2. Why are we so terrified of being wrong, when being wrong is inevitable, common, and in a huge number of cases, developmentally appropriate? Instead of having been shamefully "wrong", consider that you were at an earlier stage of learning, and one that was required for you to now arrive at a later stage of learning. You weren't "wrong" when you couldn't dress yourself, and "right" when you could. You were just at different stages of learning.

You may have been wrong when you treated that person that way, but if you see that, then you were operating within a different stage of learning at that time as compared to the one in which you see it. The shame is not in needing to learn, but in refusing to do so. Don't refuse because acknowledgement is embarrassment. Be more embarrassed by actively choosing to not learn when the opportunity was pressing itself upon you.

Science is sometimes criticized by people who do not understand science for the fact that it keeps changing what it says about a given subject. They somehow fail to see that this is the very nature of learning, to gradually improve one's approximate ideas to end up with better approximations. Technically, it's easy to argue that we will never fully and accurately understand anything. Pragmatically, every time our understanding becomes more accurate than it was, we have moved in the right direction.

This is what gives science power over mythology and wishful thinking. This is how toilet training works. This is how people have learned to harness the power of fire, and the power of the atom. This is how we improve our own life and that of those we affect. Learning is something to be proud of, and it necessarily implies a prior state that was less enlightened.

I recently watched a movie in which the main character is a gunslinger who has killed 11 men. As he stumbles into a moment of insight despite his best efforts to avoid it, he says something to the effect of, "If I could have walked away from that fight instead of killing that man, then it wasn't justified and what I have been calling honor and self-defense is just murder. And if I could have walked away from that one, …" and he goes through the list of all 11 times he killed someone.

That is, if he agreed that he had a choice where he has been claiming he had no choice, then he has a moral duty of the highest order that he has repeatedly failed in the most catastrophic terms. Continuing to live a lie is a much more comfortable alternative.

With less life and death stakes, we are all, inescapably, living lies instead of facing various realities, because we have a very low tolerance for the shame we would feel if we found we had been in the wrong.

Getting over it and actually improving is the most anti-shame thing we can do.