When I became serious about self-improvement, I didn’t know what to expect. It became clear early on that this would be painful much of the time, although regular progress and periods of deep peace more than made up for the difficulties. Still, I think I expected the path to be fairly straightforward and that it would look something like this: notice something in need of work, do the work, and then move onto the next thing. Has it been like that? No. No it hasn’t. It’s like that on occasion but a lot of the journey has involved taking several steps backward, getting stuck in some places for weeks or even months at a time, revisiting pain that I thought I healed long ago, and consistently running into situations that challenge me to relinquish destructive habits in favor of better ones. Overall, my journey has been anything and everything but straightforward.
My mindfulness buddy describes this as working through many different layers. Even after spending a lot of time making progress in a wide range of areas, there is always more that can be done. As I continue to go deeper, I keep finding new layers that contain more things to work on. This continuous discovery gives me ideas for new subjects to discuss or new ways to view subjects I’ve written about before. And every time I think I’m nearly “there”, I come across another layer and realize that the rabbit hole keeps going.
Will there ever be an end to the self-improvement journey? Will I ever run out of layers? I don’t know. Several people who have way more experience with this stuff than I do have said that there are always things to address while we’re alive, so this may very well be a lifelong journey. Even those who appear to have “made it” may still have some struggles I know nothing about since I’m only seeing their successes. Whether I make enough progress to fully self-actualize within my lifetime or end up making regular improvements until I take my last breath, I still plan to do as much learning, growing, and sharing as possible.
