Growth is the meaning of life! Why are we here? Growth! If you ask why growth, well, then we get into a whole different realm of philosophy or spirituality. Nevertheless, no matter how you look at it, it must be accepted that the lowest common denominator of all things, beyond dispute or moral philosophy, is growth. This is an important concept for analysis because it leads us directly to an understanding of motivation itself as well as how motivation fits within the biological necessity of connection to our world and to each other (and that sounds kind of spiritual, doesn’t it?).
First of all, let me point out that the universe is expanding (growth), that everything in the biological world starts out small and gets larger (growth), and that, even in metaphysics, all ideas tend toward attempts at inclusion or expansion (growth). It is not a surprise, then, that from a psychological perspective, unless we are growing in some sense, we become depressed, stagnant, feel stifled, and maybe we even fall apart. What I am saying here is: when people are having emotional problems, it is frequently the result of stunted growth.
Now that is a pretty strange thing to say, I suppose, so I’d better try to explain what I mean. Human emotional growth follows human physical growth. In relationships with others, we find emotional sustenance in interaction, just as we find physical sustenance of growth by consuming food and drink. In relationships with others, we protect our feelings in interaction by expressing anger or trying to avoid, just as with physical protection we defend ourselves through aggression or escape. Through the intake of food and by physically protecting ourselves, we are able to live. By sustaining and protecting ourselves at the interpersonal level we allow for emotional growth. And when we develop some confidence that we are, and will be, both protected and sustained at the interpersonal level, we begin to expand our realm of emotional growth into the sphere of interpersonal relationships.
We protect and sustain the physical well-being and emotional aspects of our family members (especially children, but also other adults). Caring for others is a more mature type of growth that occurs between feeling responsible for others and feeling a need to care adequately for oneself. When we care for others, we grow beyond our own independent selves. We care for our children to make sure that they grow physically, but we also attempt to feed them emotionally and protect them from an overabundance of pain and suffering. The development of a balance between responsibility and self-care begins when we are receiving emotional sustenance and protection from our own care-givers as children. If it is sufficiently demonstrated to us that we are important, but must care about others (especially those who have cared for us), we develop a confidence about the fact that sustenance and protection will be generally, most of the time, adequate. When we gain such confidence, we internalize confidence to such an extent that we know we are important enough to be treated well by others. We also develop the ability to feel responsible for how our actions affect others because we truly care about them, and we develop the ability to take care of others not only because we care about them but also because they are an extension of ourselves, like branches to a tree (growth).
These essential individual and family connections are the building blocks necessary for the growth of a community and for a society, where rules for conduct (laws) are balanced with individual knowledge of right and wrong in interpersonal and inter-group communications. The whole concept comes full circle when you think about the fact that both physical and emotional sustenance and self-protection are more likely in larger groups. From the beginning of man, and in the interactions of herds or schools of fish, we see that there is safety and efficiency in numbers, as well as a better chance of being protected. We are all intimately connected in every way by the existence of emotional and physical needs and desires. Our own growth is a central factor in remaining a part of our families and communities.
Growth is thus at the center of every kind of motivation. That is, everything we strive for, everything we attempt to achieve, everything we want or desire, that is...everything we do, is based on a need for growth. We might want a bigger car, we might want more education, we might want to get to know more people, or learn how to love, and all of it is based on a need for growth. In psychotherapy people strive for better communication so that they can grow within themselves and through connections with others. Part of that communication involves getting to know the inner self, to integrate parts of oneself about which one is not quite aware. Growth involves all kinds of incorporation, integration, and communication.
Since growth is so central to our existence, without it we begin to have serious emotional (and sometimes physical) problems. Obviously these problems can begin in a lack of connection with others, but we can also start having problems because we do not care for or protect ourselves well enough, because we do not care for or protect anyone else enough (these last two are often intimately related), or because we have not been, or fear that we will not be, cared for or protected well enough. When there is no problem in these areas we continue to grow and we maintain our mental health. We continue to strive. But when we are not growing, we often become depressed and feel we cannot grow. We can become anxious with the idea that we might damage another person's growth or with fear that we cannot meet the demands necessary to grow. When we are cut off from others we can feel a lack of growth from the lack of connection (which is, as I have explained, a kind of growth in itself).
As indicated above, there are many ways of feeding and protecting ourselves and others. Intellectual growth or financial growth help sustain emotional growth, just as learning more about ourselves does. When we insist upon our right to pursue these goals or others, we are protecting ourselves so that we can continue to grow. Similarly, we like to see these kinds of growth in those that we love, and we tend to be willing to protect that growth in them since they are extensions of ourselves, which in turn helps us with our own sense of family and community growth.
The meaning of life? Well...I don’t know if we will ever know what that is. But if you want to think about the lowest common denominator, the one concept that comes close to explaining why things are the way they are, the one concept that stands at the center of everything from biology to the connection between people, inanimate objects, and the cosmos... that one concept is growth.
