Remember when you were little, and all you would eat was chicken fingers at every restaurant you went to?
No burgers, no pasta, no salad, no seafood…only chicken fingers.
Then, when you were twenty-two and your date suggests that you should go to a local Indian restaurant, you are all “Yeah, that’d be cool” because you want to sound cool, while inside you are like “Frick! Do they even serve chicken fingers at Indian restaurants?!”
At some point between the samosa appetizer and the lamb vindaloo and the gulab jamun dessert, your taste buds explode in a frenzy of delicious desire and you wonder why you never let yourself experience this culinary bliss before.
Ever had that happen before?
Congratulations. Then you’ve grown.
Wasn’t it exciting? A little (ashamedly) easy?
Gathering your cumulative experiences and learning from them to change and evolve is this fun little journey we call life.
Let me paint you a picture, and I bet it is a picture we all know all too well these days:
You do the same thing every day.
You wake up, you start your coffee, you brush your teeth, you get ready for the day, you work for a negligible amount of hours doing tasks that glaze your eyeballs over as you mindlessly fill out forms and write code, you eat the same boring lunch that you have had for the past five years straight, you work for a few more hours, you turn on the television and zone out on bad 90’s sitcoms and Netflix binges, you eat dinner, you have vapid conversation about tasseled-vs-non-tasseled loafers with your significant other/roommate/goldfish, you brush your teeth, you go to bed.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Sound familiar?
Here’s something I want you to think about very carefully though:
If you are not growing, then you are dead.
I’m not making this up.
We die when we cease growing.
Our organs stop pumping, our cells stop regenerating, our lungs stop expanding.
We stop.
We are dead.
(As an aside, do you know how hard it is to find the official diagnosis/symptoms for ‘Death’ online?)
“Did you know that your fingernails and hair grow for up to six months after you die.”
Totally lie.
Truth is, when you are dead you actually dehydrate, making it seem like your hair and fingernails are growing. Your once plump and healthy skin is receding like a marsh at low tide.
How creepy is that?!
We mistake skin essentially sucking itself onto a skeleton to be an indicator of growth.
Look at me! Nothing is changing and my body is psychically imploding on itself but no worries, I checked and it definitely looks like I’m still growing. Yippee!
I don’t care if it is a 9-5 job, a side-project, a relationship, living in a hut on a tropical island…there could be a zillion different ways you are lulling yourself into a sense of complacency and stagnancy.
Your life does not have to be a non-stop adrenaline-fest filled to a tipping point with meaningful experiences every moment of your existence.
That would be ridiculously exhausting.
But if you are not finding ways to grow and change, bettering yourself in the process, then awesome.
You’re dead.
Good luck with that.
Photo Credit: Getty – Stockbyte
Amen!
When you started talking about chicken fingers, I couldn’t stop thinking about those 40 cent lunches we had to eat as elementary school students. The one in the tin foil, wrapped in plastic, microwaved to potential.
I went to Portland for the first time in a very long time. The last time I traveled anywhere was Vegas last summer and it was great. Portland was great. I dread having ever to come back to San Francisco. Maybe next time I’ll think more responsibly and actually move somewhere without having to come back with the focus of coming back home. I think that’s a really big point to understand.
Jonathan – Haha, yes, those school lunches were something for sure! I remember bringing home the menu and my parents would occasionally spring for something off the “Hot Lunch” menu. Otherwise I had a lunch packed for me every day.
I’m still not sure where I want to end up. I love Maine, and the place sure loves old people so I’m sure that will be an end-game. In the next 30-40 years though? Not sure. There certainly is a lot of world out there to experience!
Ok, for one, I loved the chicken finger analogy. I am guily of this. I also loved that you used the word “frick” in this post.
Second, I completely agree with you. Growing is an essential part of life. I don’t understand how some people just stay stagnant in their lives and are okay with that. If you ask me, I’d much rather live than be dead.
Haha, I use the word “frick” daily. People think I’m substituting cause I don’t want to swear…but in reality that is the language I use. 🙂
That is the scariest thing to me. Growing stagnant. Waking up one morning and realizing you wanted so much more from life that you never attempted to experience. As I mentioned, I don’t think that a 9-5 or a entrepreneurial lifestyle is what causes us to die…it is when we let ourselves die inside because we somehow stopped changing and growing.
This is so true, we need to be growing if we want to experience any kind of success. A life of the same old thing day after day is really no life at all, it’s pretty dead.
I liked how you started off with the story of the chicken fingers, it’s something that we can all relate to! We all had our favorite food growing up and rarely wanted to vary from that. For years and years I always ordered the same thing, I always knew what I wanted from every restaurant that I went to without looking at the menu. Then I started changing things up and found a lot of new foods that I loved! That can easily be translated into other areas of life too!
Thanks for sharing,
Stacy
I’m glad you liked the chicken fingers. I did have an introduction written about the show “Twin Peaks” which I thought was seriously weird stuff in the 90’s but watched in full over a handful of sittings now that it is on Netflix.
It’s great you bring up the new things you found when you started changing things up. I’ve found a ton of new food that I love. Don’t get me wrong…I still love me a good chicken finger (yes, all breaded and fried and so disgustingly bad for you that any food purists reading this comment will immediately Unsubscribe from the RSS!) but I’m willing to try just about anything because I’ve found that there are so many new things I love that I never knew about before.
You are right…it does translate so well to other areas of life. 😉
Have you ever thought about creating an ebook or guest authoring on other sites? I have a blog based on the same subjects you discuss and would love to have you share some stories/information. I know my visitors would value your work. If you are even remotely interested, feel free to shoot me an e mail.
Tommy – I put off eBooks for a LONG while, but have been working on one for release in the next couple months.
Please, drop me an email anytime! With the eBook and some other projects my time is pretty accounted for currently, but I am always open to chatting about guesting on other sites. Thanks for the offer and stopping by!
Every time I pick up a self-help or self-exploration type book – it always opens with some insight on how most people feel selfish or ridiculous to take time out for themselves. So they spend most of their time (if not life) catering to other people’s needs and desires, while neglecting their own. Which can be a huge inhibitor to (self) change because if you don’t know yourself – how can you make things better? And, I think, people might be so used to helping others that they might not KNOW how to help themselves and prefer not to do it.
Also, change is frightening. Not just casual change, like trying new food or taking a new route to work (though that’s probably the best way to invite bigger change) – but the life altering perspectives. Changing how you deal with people, changing your views about yourself, becoming a new person in an attempt to become healthier, happier and more whole. And I definitely think THAT scares people away too – consciously or otherwise.
Tatiana – Very true (I think?). The changes we have to make for ourselves ARE often the most difficult, both because we are afraid or we simply do not know how.
I find change to be a gateway drug. As soon as you are willing to change little things, bigger things soon follow. A different dish at a restaurant this week might mean a different haircut next week might mean a different career goal the week after…and so it goes.
We’ll never reach perfection (and really, who would want to?!) but the changes along the way all add up to make us who we are. Which is hopefully growing organisms, constantly evolving and becoming better.
Amen is right! Very powerfully worded.
A couple of months back…it just sort of hit me…
I felt like the proverbial “hamster on the wheel”, and that was at doing something I love! It all just made me pause. (a “pause” that lasted about two months!) And in that pause, most definitely – growth.
So – love reading this today! And…right on!
btw: I’m alive!!!
Lance – I love it! I think it is often in those “pauses” that we realize our growth the most. Life is a delicate balance of striving for that crazy great growth and relishing in the pauses.
Glad you got some time on the wheel and off!