You grow with the challenge
In the first 25-30 years, growth was exciting: higher, faster, further. But in our mid-30s, ‘growth’ often feels different. Instead of getting higher, we are juggling more: career, family, partnership, socialising, self-care - and not dropping the ball. I have been thinking about whether we are really still ‘growing’ in this phase of life and whether the saying ‘you grow with your tasks’ applies without restriction or whether a different attribution would not be more correct in this phase.
But where to? To what dimension? For children, the proverb may be just as true as it gets as they inevitably shoot upwards. But in your mid-30s? Where do you grow to? Or isn’t it just the amount of tasks on your desk that grow?
At least it seems to me that I'm just learning to keep more balls in the air at the same time: Job, partnership, family, maintaining social relationships, private projects, health self-care, house, garden, etc. Growth is not necessarily the size that comes to my mind to philosophise about. Every topic gets exactly the attention it needs, every ball exactly the stimuluous it needs so that it doesn't fall, but rarely more.
Everyday life is no longer focussed on growth, but on maintenance. You don't grow, you structure; you delegate, prioritise, react, improvise. Growth, as the saying goes, is rarely spectacular in this phase of life. Perhaps it is not personal growth that takes centre stage in this phase of life, but the growth of the system that you maintain around you. And this system demands stability rather than greatness. It's less about aiming higher and more about not losing your balance. It's less about fitting in more tasks and more about finding the right ones - and not losing sight of yourself in the process.
Lo and behold - on closer inspection, things are growing everywhere. While the strawberries ripen in the garden, the bank account balance falls and grows in an illustrious rollercoaster. The number of completed projects at work is growing, as is the pile of books on the bedside table (yet, unfortunately unread). The children are constantly growing out of their clothes anyway and the number of kilometres completed with the bike trailer is also increasing daily. Somehow we've grown enough with our tasks so far to be able to pause for a moment and enjoy the fruits of our growth.
