Richard Smith has spent thirty-five years in science and still teaches microbiology as an associate professor at the University of Hertfordshire. Alongside that work he coaches people and wrote A Phenomenal Life, driven by a long curiosity about why human beings behave the way they do. In a recent Inspire Vision conversation he described something he calls human becoming. Self-improvement is where nearly everyone starts, he said, and a harder question waits for the people who have done that work well. Once you know yourself, what then?
It is a fair question, and an uncomfortable one for anyone who has read the books, sat through the retreats, and done the honest work of looking inward. Underneath most of that effort sits a quiet assumption that a finished version of ourselves is waiting somewhere ahead. Sort out the patterns, heal the old wounds, and then life can simply be lived.
Life does not cooperate with that plan. Beauty still catches us off guard, people still reject us, and eventually someone we love dies and takes with them the world we shared. Each of these changes us a little, with or without our permission. Every morning we wake up unfinished, and tomorrow morning we will wake up unfinished again, which is either discouraging or a relief depending on how much you were looking forward to being done.
It is worth pressing on what growth actually asks of us. Change happens to everyone. Bodies age, jobs end, children move out, and none of that by itself makes anyone wiser. Growth is narrower. It still requires change, which means it requires letting something go, and that is usually where people quietly dig in their heels. Some small part of who we have been has to die so that something else can be born, and very few of us volunteer for that.
Does that hold for every loss? The question deserves an honest pause, because the easy answer does real harm. Some of what happens to people is simply too heavy to be treated as a lesson waiting to be extracted. Deep trauma often needs medical care, time, and the steady presence of someone who will stay, long before anyone asks what it was meant to teach. Sometimes the most honest outcome is learning to live alongside what happened.
Even where growth is possible, it seldom arrives all at once. No nervous system can release everything in a single season, and trying to tends to make things worse. What seems possible is smaller and slower: noticing one pattern that has stopped serving us, and loosening our grip on it.
Anger is a useful place to watch this in real time. Most of us say “I am angry,” and the grammar quietly turns the anger into an identity. “I am feeling anger” is clumsier to say and considerably more accurate. Two people can watch the same event, and one shrugs while the other’s jaw tightens. Whatever decided between those two responses was there long before the event, often laid down in childhood when an adult’s words carried far more authority than they deserved. Michael Brown’s The Presence Process treats these reactions as messengers, signals pointing back toward what still needs attention. Curiosity about the message tends to accomplish more than any effort to tear the feeling out. The old pathway can stay where it is, recognized and set to one side, while a newer one gets worn in through use.
Judgment works the same way, only faster. The moment we decide we already know what someone is, curiosity leaves the room. Judgment feels like clarity, which is part of what makes it so hard to catch, but what it actually does is put distance between us and whatever we have just filed away. The most corrosive version is aimed inward, at the quiet verdict that we are not enough, or do not belong, or are somehow the problem. That verdict separates us from ourselves, and it rarely announces itself as judgment at all.
Grief may be the clearest case, because nobody comes through it unchanged. The world that included that person is gone, and underneath the sorrow sits a practical question about who we have to become to keep living without them. There is no quick answer, and anyone offering one can be gently ignored. What does seem true is that grief carries its own information. If something is worth grieving, it was worth loving, and the size of the ache is a fairly honest measure of what that person meant.
None of this moves in a straight line. The image of a single path, held firmly from beginning to end, runs through a good deal of religious teaching, and there is comfort in it, but real lives tend to cycle. People return to old patterns, loosen them, slip back, and come around again with a little more awareness than the time before. Believing growth should be linear puts enormous pressure on a person, and that pressure does its own damage. Nobody learns to sail by staying in the harbor. The storms arrive regardless, and what develops over time is something like seamanship, a better read of the weather and steadier hands when the boat heels over.
Change will keep arriving, invited or not. What stays open is how we meet it, and whether a loss, or a surprise, or a sudden flare of anger gets examined or simply absorbed into the old shape. Somewhere in your own life right now there is probably one small pattern that has outlived its usefulness. Take a moment this week to sit with it, without any hurry to make it disappear, and consider what it might be telling you about who you are still becoming.
© Dr. Doug Gulbrandsen