Reading Time: 4 minutes
Sushmita delves into the meanings of growing and outgrowing. A Different Truths exclusive.
Every manifestation is an outgrowth of the movements in and of the consciousness, individual and collective. Every reflection, on the plane and template of our life, is a projection on, and of, the consciousness. Life is a screen that screens everything, the apparent letting not the hidden stay hidden forever, though, initially, in the apparent hides a lot — and that lot is an immeasurable lot. Such is the plot of life! When the apparent is found not to do our bidding, when the apparent leads not to the answers and solutions yearned for, when the cravings for the material and conventionally acclaimed success we grow out of, growing aware of the gnawing and promising knock within of ‘something’ that means and is everything, the hidden, hitherto unbidden, stays no more unbidden. That, that we are ridden with and become aware that are being overridden by, that we seek and cry, beseech and implore to shed, yearn deliverance from.
The process so unfurls, calling out repeatedly and incessantly to outgrow the bondage to the apparent, outgrow the bondage to the ignorance of the hidden in it.
Thus, grows our life, as unfold its folds, open its layers, times at times rosy, and at times other, thorny, calling out to us to grow, and grow out of all labels that we ascribe to life, in our attempt to describe life. So conveys the wisdom, “We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses”: a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln, beckoning to see through and beyond the apparent, seeing the apparent differently thus. Difficult, to embrace and embody the wisdom? Yes and undoubtedly! And yet, the process so unfurls, calling out repeatedly and incessantly to outgrow the bondage to the apparent, outgrow the bondage to the ignorance of the hidden in it.
At the same time, instead of delving on the process, though for which any space is insufficient and yet we do delve during the course of this process intrinsic of growth and outgrowth, this particular outpouring is a derivative of the revealed, ‘out’ in ‘growing’.
How often we note and acknowledge, “It is a part and parcel of the growing process”, we know not, as such a declaration is so frequent that it could be even called a habitual utterance. But it took a moment of that revelation to accept, admit and acknowledge: Growing is a process of outgrowing. As we grow, we outgrow… just as the physical growth (vertical and that of the girth) makes us outgrow our garments.
As we grow, so we outgrow the preceding notions and ideas, thus transforming our thought-process, re-forming our ideas and ideologies…
And again, growth: is it a matter physical only or only the non-physical or integral? As we grow, so we outgrow the preceding notions and ideas, thus transforming our thought-process, re-forming our ideas and ideologies, that’s engraved on the stone of life: Nothing is engraved on stone, in life. It is a process of growing, a process of outgrowing, a process of discerning, a process of acknowledging the whole, the totality of life, entailing the embracing of the arduous process of growing, growing out of and outgrowing the zone of comfort, definitions getting re-defined as are refined, life beckoning: “Re-find.”
Life presents and necessitates the all-inclusive as the conclusive, and not the divisive approach, to growth, and yet, the routes presented are exclusive!
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Acknowledges Robert Frost [1].
Words, too, get thus coined, attaining and gaining their credentials, identity and credibility, given the work they do
‘Presence’ and ‘absence’, apparently paradoxically, are coexistent — as two sides of the same coin, albeit they are deemed and accorded the relative status of ‘antonyms’, and maybe just because they are two sides of the metaphorical coin of life! Words, too, get thus coined, attaining and gaining their credentials, identity and credibility, given the work they do: the work of explaining and expressing the experiences, pressing for the demands, reaching out with the messages, conveying all that they do — and conveying that a lot is hidden in them which seeks release. A lot they incubate, mean much more than they are given the credence for… the unacknowledged meanings either a result of taking the same for granted or as openly implicit and hence deserving no mention or because of the unawareness about the same.
But through all the movements and events, within and without, just as we grow and outgrow the grown-out-of, growing and outgrowing a process integral and eternal, words too stand their ground, resolute, confident that our understanding of them will grow, incorporating those which were kept out of the consciousness, consciousness growing up to them, outgrowing the previous and adding to (or shedding) the earlier. Moments thus grow: as the moment one moment comes into being, it is outgrown by the next that very moment, irrespective of whether we call this physical life momentary (and maybe also because of which we call it momentary) or the life lived has been exemplary and hence is hailed as momentous.
The counsel, the acknowledgment of the seer in William Shakespeare, “There are many events in the womb of time, which will be delivered”, feels like an affirmation for the words and their meanings as well, timelessly growing and outgrowing as they are! No more can ‘out’ go unacknowledged in ‘growing’, every act and manifestation of growth, its outgrowth, the process of growing, the process of outgrowing intrinsically and essentially, ‘essenc-e-ally’!
How can we keep out and take out ‘out’, from ‘growing’?!
©Sushmita Mukherjee
Photos from the Internet
