Why Growth Hurts

I recently found the following passage I highlighted many years ago from Alice Walker's book Living by the Word. It was during a challenging time in my life and I remember how it made me feel oddly at ease with myself despite the circumstances:

"Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger than we were before.

Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant.

But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be... for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed."

I think the above is true for any living organism no matter its size or composition. This includes companies, communities, countries and the world at large.

When we are growing, changing and stretching our boundaries of what's possible, it tends to hurt a little (or a lot). And just knowing that this is normal, unavoidable in fact, at least let's us carry on with the knowledge that we are on the right path and that every step brings us closer to the light at the end of the tunnel.