At Your Pace

Slow Living

Jun 8

Preface

The simple fact is, I want to grow at my own pace; growth being the maturation and refining process of one from infantile ignorance to adolescent awareness to interdependent efficacy.

There are a million reasons for adhering to some outside growth plan: money, religion, politics, culture, social acceptance, family, death, etc.

Yet, if I rebel against anything in life, it is the progressive pressure to grow my soul faster than my own ability to enjoy and comprehend every step of the process.

Is not this growth, to change by degrees but comprehending the change?

If there is purpose to life it is this, to gain understanding.

Can one gain true understanding if one is forced to grow at a pace that doesn’t allow time and method for comprehension to take place?

What good are the mile markers if one is simply counting them?

To grow at one’s own pace, to choose the growth, to accept the change, and to enjoy the point of it all, is the ultimate and transcendent human experience.

The “Not Enough Time” Trope

For most of my life, I tried to match my personal growth to the rhythm of traditional timetables and programs, as most humans do.

At five you do this, at eight you do this, at 14 you do this, at 16 you do this, at 18 you’re now this, and at 21 and beyond you can do and are this, as if life and learning was somehow connected to hour markers and presupposed stages that had the power to transform the growth of my soul (mind, body, and spirit) to match the program outline.

Every human organization seems to promote a type of check listing and typecasting, turning humans into slaves of time-tested, cultural expectation.

Instead of culture supporting human existence, human existence has turned that notion on its head and humans now support the self-perpetuation of the culture for culture’s sake. Somehow culture has become a bizarre mastermind plan of its own.

Humans are so willing to give up their sovereignty to mechanistic control to gain and enjoy a counterfeit sense of accomplishment and security that they often forget to relish and enjoy the beautiful growth process from one perspective and position to another.

Why are we in such a hurry to check off the next growth box?

Why do we need to meet the level of the norm without thought for whether or not we’ve truly gained something valuable while ever reaching for such a generic and empty standard?

Although I am a religiously spiritual person, I have found that religious culture, like any other human culture, can turn personal growth into a race against the clock.

Religion, like many organizational structures, often aggrandizes program and ritual above that of personal growth by assuming that physical actions—what a person does—is equal to understanding and spiritual development.

If you just follow the program, you’ll be material for heaven.

Yet, I’ve found the opposite to be true, I’ve followed the program and I discovered for myself that my joy and understanding is not equal to, in any way, shape, or form, my desire for the person I hope to be in heaven.

Cultural religious programming has not worked sufficiently to force my mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual growth to match the impossibly high meritocratic expectations of human cultural understanding of god’s paradisaical heaven.

My heart has not caught up with my actions, nor will it if my comprehension is lacking, and personally, I believe that heaven is all about heart; actions being a derivative of intention.

Therefore, the actions = comprehension or program = redemption, type of spiritual growth is, in my opinion, fundamentally flawed.

Let me be clear, this is a critique of religious culture, not a judgment on religious belief or doctrine; belief and doctrine, in my opinion and experience, are often sullied by cultural interpretation and dictatorship.

In this example, I am simply pointing out that cultural expectations can take on lives of their own that over time fundamentally displace the simplicity of doctrine for a more human construct: a race against the clock to get to the top (whatever that top may be).

Throughout my university studies I’ve found the same moronic litmus test, using archaic grading programs to measure competency within a subject.

How many students have graduated university to find that their professions require real competency and understanding, not a check the box for an “A” or rubric-based type comprehension.

Although it is beneficial to one’s growth and learning to have and reach for standards of excellence and expectation, when a timer is used to clock one’s progress toward the assimilation of the standard, one simply ends up with a good grade or a good time, not a true level of comprehension.

Within many cultural structures there is a sort of “not enough time” framework of grow now or forever pay the consequences of your slothfulness, as if personal growth is under some time sensitive pressure cooker.

The faster one dutifully complies, the more one is praised for their speedy adaptation.

Natural Cycles & Forcing growth

Certainly, there are aspects of human existence, like natural cycles, that push the “I’m not ready for this” or “I’d like to grow at my own pace and in my own way” boundary, and in some ways, force one to move forward into a new stage of life before one feels completely certain or ready.

As all young girls know, the inevitability of beginning one’s cycle is out there in an unbeknownst future. Although every girl’s body is different, there is an expectation that at some point in the future she’ll join the ranks of cycling females.

Puberty in every culture is a physical growth point that, ready or not, as a human you’ll encounter the transformation in some form or another.

It’s not so much a deadline, as it is a coming to terms with the inevitable.

Like physiological changes from adolescence to adulthood, the inevitability of death also looms uncomfortably in the future for every life force on Earth.

Despite human attempts to thwart or ignore death, there it is, a cyclical force we ever grow toward.

Like a plant or animal, human bodies experience an aging process. From birth to death, there isn’t a way to stem the tide.

Nature’s cycles, because of their inevitability, force us to grow in one way or another; or in other words, nature’s cycles are growth.

Therefore, time is natures way of moving its parts through a growth process, and as we are a part of nature, we often grow physically on its timetable that is not within our control.

This physical phenomenon of ever moving toward inevitability begs the question, if nature forces change and growth to take place, isn’t it also a good practice for humans to force emotional and spiritual growth with programs and cultural expectations, than to simply hope growth will take place on its own?

Part of being human is growing and like a timer ticking toward an end, our time will be up—the “when” unbeknownst to us. Shouldn’t that certainty necessitate a high degree of haste and rush?

If one has only so much time, and that time cannot be quantified equally, isn’t that cause enough to make each moment count and to push oneself to grow as quickly as possible?

Growth Sync Issues

It’s highly likely, despite the inevitability of one’s own demise, that if given the choice, humans would often stunt their own growth rather than face the consequences of it.

Growth is often very uncomfortable.

Because of this discomfort, the oddity of human growth is that physical growth and emotional growth are not always in sync.

One’s body may move through nature’s rhythms and cycles, yet one’s mind and spirit may not be in harmony with the physical changes taking place.

There have been many times throughout my life when my body’s aging process wasn’t in sync with my spiritual and emotional maturity.

One area of life I found this growth-sync issue has been exaggerated is within man-made cultural structures and institutions.

For example, familial cultures often interfere with one’s innate inclinations and preferences, forcing one, whether aggressively or passively, to adopt and adapt to parental guidance or demands.

Within human constructs, one’s natural growth processes are often forced to take on meaning and purpose to support the cultural structure.

Where puberty could, within natural cycles, represent many things for one’s growth and understanding, within certain cultural frameworks sexuality and procreation have been institutionalized through marital structures that include a variety of forms, many of which have presupposed that females are immediately adapted for sexual relationships, marriage, and motherhood because they cycle.

Despite the natural ability to procreate, one’s emotional and spiritual desire for such a thing will not always mirror the cultural expectations.

Survival in different eras, environments, and technological advancements has certainly played a role in the constructs of human ambition, and therefore influenced one’s ability to synchronize spirituality with physiology.

Food getting, as any first-year Anthropology student learns, is paramount to survival and the development of culture, and if food is scarce or difficult to come by, one will prioritize cultural structure over individualistic emotional and spiritual development in order to eat.

In fact, when food is scarce culturally harmonizing spiritual ritual into a cultural construct could be considered a reasonable, even necessary, survival-based human inclination.

If a group’s belief systems, both ideologically and theologically, are in sync, they are more likely to produce secure food getting and producing technologies over a society that is warring within.

Survival also often dictates sexual cultural construction, as well as a myriad of other institutions that promulgate the perpetuation of the human species.

However, despite the Anthropological and Sociological reasoning behind the necessity to accelerate emotional and spiritual growth to meet the demands of survival-based inclinations, I have personally found force-syncing growth to meet artificial cultural demands to be emotionally and spiritually demoralizing and debilitating.

At Your Pace

As a member of the human family, I recognize the part I play in perpetuating the species. I also comprehend the necessity for the implementation of cultural structures for survival’s, and even thriving’s, sake.

However, I also can distinguish through both observation and experience the fact that humans, although a product of nature, have the capacity for much more than robotic and instinctual inclinations of survival, even amidst surviving.

My personal growth rebellion and frustration is not with natural cycles, nor with human constructs that enhance the human family’s capacity to survive.

Instead, my frustration lies in the human programs that try to keep up, control, and mimic natural cycles with their own haphazard and ever-changing agendas many humans promote as necessary, when in fact, they are not.

Certainly, perpetuating the human species is nature’s work, as it is a natural human inclination; one could even call it instinctual.

However, how humans sustain and maintain themselves is often a selfish endeavor and power-struggle based on egoistic desires, not a oneness with nature’s cycles.

How many young women over thousands of years have fallen prey to male predators, in the name of legal ownership, God’s will, and the preservation of the species, when selfish predatory behavior is not a necessity for sustaining human existence.

Human constructs are often more like petri dishes of dominance, where humans play with power, rather than necessary survival-based inclinations useful for the development and perpetuation of all.

As one who feels bored with and wasted from bumping around in culturally defined, human concoctions of meritocratic nonsense, I assert that it is time for sovereign individuals to take matters into their own hands and seek understanding and growth using a more individualistic and emotionally and spiritually based approach.

Growth is both a natural cycle and a sovereign choice.

However, within human dictatorial constraints, growth becomes a race against a non-existent clock, a competition for dominance, and an hierarchical meritocracy bent on creating power, not perpetuation.

Outside of human ideas of success and valor is a different timetable, a different set of weights and measures, one driven, not by power, but by plenty.

There is time enough outside of the constant noise and expectation of human social and cultural organizations to explore, observe, and comprehend.

Nature’s rhythms, although less predictable in some ways to human nonsense, are integral and functional, yet slow enough to teach one to notice the opening of the petals, the steady flow of brook and river, and the shifts and shapes of the stars and moon.

The older I get, the less patience I have for so-called time-tested traditions of the ironically self-declared, ‘wise humans’, the homo sapiens sapiens.

Conclusion

Growth, real growth, the kind that leads to greater comprehension and understanding of what is right, real, and good, cannot be sped up, meritocratically based, or force-fed through programming.

Growth is the result of a desire for more that compels one, at one’s natural pace, to comprehend, consume, and assimilate.

Understanding and comprehension materialize when one is both capable of and fully ripe to embrace what one desires, and that can take serious, non-negotiable, and customizable amounts of time.

I assert that, although there are positive growth experiences found in every aspect of human life, even human institutions and the gross infallibility of the species, from this point forward I will no longer allow the predatory constructs of humans to dictate my personal growth.

Instead, I am taking a step back to create an intentional, more personal, and more harmonious growth pattern, one that engenders individual sovereignty over dependence on cultural construct.

How can one clearly comprehend how to vote, how to contribute, how to discern truth from error, if one is constantly wrapped up in power play games, emotional and spiritual totalitarianism or dictatorship, and constantly retaliating or retreating from social, cultural, or sexual bullies and predators?

If one believes and lives under the assumption that one is subject to such base and silly sixth-grade nonsense, one will continually be forced and manipulated, not to grow and harmonize with nature’s constructs, but to slavishly adapt to a much less formidable foe, the simple and overconfident human.

The individual has evolved too used to being manipulated in growth. We are intelligent, sentient beings with wills and desires of our own that have the capacity to challenge and change norms. The status quo is ours to develop, to design. Why, then, do we spend so much of our time squeezing ourselves into constructs we have outgrown?

Growth, in all of its forms, is of interest to me, but not under the guise of cultural, human-based, nonsensical tickers and timestamps.

Today, I begin a new chapter. Although I have lived my life as a skeptic of human fallibility, I’m turning over a new leaf of sovereign paradigmatic proportions, and my skepticism has been enhanced to such a degree that every human construct I encounter will be scrutinized with extreme prejudice.

No human institution will dictate my growth and capacity for understanding.

At my own sovereign and soul-led pace, that is my new mantra.