Why you're not built for constant growth

Have you ever felt guilty for having a slower stretch?

Maybe there was a period where you weren’t really moving forward on anything.

Perhaps you weren’t building, improving, or making progress in any way you could point to.

And maybe you were mostly just getting through the days.

But instead of letting that be alright, some part of you probably started worrying about it.

Wondering whether you’d lost your momentum, whether you were falling behind everyone else, or whether you’d ever really get going again.

So maybe you tried to push yourself back into gear before you were ready.

And it probably didn’t go all that well, did it?

If any of that resonates, it might be worth wondering:

What if those slower stretches were never really a problem to be solved?

And what if we’ve been expecting something from ourselves that goes against our natural rhythms?

Somewhere along the way, most of us picked up the idea that we should always be growing.

We should always be improving at something.

We should always be working toward the next version of our lives.

And a phase where none of that is happening tends to feel like a failure of some kind.

Like we’ve stalled, or gone backward, or let something slip that we’ll have to make up for later.

So we often try to push through the slower periods rather than letting ourselves actually have them.

Maybe we start things we don’t have the energy for, and then we treat our own tiredness as a problem with our discipline.

But it’s worth asking where that expectation actually came from in the first place.

Because it doesn’t really seem to show up anywhere else in the natural world.

Nothing in nature only ever grows, does it?

Instead, things seem to move between expansion and contraction, over and over, for as long as they’re alive.

Trees put on growth through part of the year and then pull everything back inward for the rest of it.

Fields get planted, harvested, and then left alone for a season.

Even the tide, which never really stops moving, spends half its time going out.

And none of that is treated as a failure of any kind.

Nobody looks at a bare tree in February and worries that it’s lost its ambition.

We understand, without even having to think about it, that the pulling back is part of how the whole thing works.

That the growing depends on the fallow stretch that came before it.

And that something is still happening underground during the months when nothing shows above it.

It seems like we’ve somehow managed to grasp all of that about everything except ourselves.

Most of us know, at least in theory, that we’re biological creatures.

But it’s surprisingly easy to live as though we’re not.

So we often work the same hours in December as we do in June, and we might even expect the same output from ourselves in a hard year as in an easy one.

And we tend to treat our energy like it should be steady and reliable, the way a machine’s would be.

Meanwhile, our bodies keep running on rhythms that many of us mostly just ignore.

Such as energy that rises and falls across the day, seasons that ask somewhat different things of us, and stretches where we’re expanding followed by stretches where we simply need to consolidate what we’ve already taken on.

So when we try to override all of that, our bodies do tend to insist eventually.

Usually through illness, exhaustion, or that stubborn sort of flatness that no amount of willpower seems to shift.

Fortunately, there’s a gentler way.

Here’s the part that tends to get missed:

The slower phases aren’t really just dead time.

Things are happening in them, maybe just not the sort of things that might show up as progress.

We’re usually integrating whatever the last stretch put us through.

We’re recovering some of the capacity we spent.

And sometimes we’re also working out what we actually want, which rarely happens while we’re busy.

Sure, maybe none of that looks like much from the outside.

After all, there’s nothing to report to the world, and maybe nothing much to feel pleased with ourselves about.

But a fair amount of what makes the next expansion possible seems to get built during exactly these slower, gentler periods.

Which probably means the contraction was doing something useful all along.

Maybe we just couldn’t really see it while it was happening.

So what can we do instead?

You probably don’t need to change much here. Maybe you can simply work on how you read these stretches when they come.

So the next time you notice yourself in a slower phase, maybe try not to treat it as evidence that something’s going wrong.

Perhaps you could even consider that it might just be a phase rather than a failure, and that phases, by their nature, tend to pass on their own.

You might also ask what would actually help, given where you happen to be.

Which will sometimes be rest, and sometimes be something small and undemanding just to keep you ticking over.

But maybe it’s not the ambitious plan you’d have made for yourself several months ago, and that’s completely okay.

Because we don’t really need to be growing all the time to be alright.

Nothing else in nature does.

And the pull toward expanding again often comes back on its own, once there’s something to draw on, which is what periods of contraction often ask us to build.

If this work resonates with you, you can support it here.

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