Endlessly new life: Life is continuous growth and decay
Channel: Quest for a Meaningful Life
Date: 15/10/2019

So it's another cliche to add to the list that nothing in life can remain in a steady state. 
There's always a progress, a movement, a growth. 
One way it's put is that everything is either growing or dying. 
There is no steady state. 
Though what we see as the steady state is what it looks like when there is what appears to be kind of a stable pattern of growing and dying at a rate that makes sort of a plateau that can last a long time. 
Like if we see a baby growing, well, the growing becomes obvious with the quick changes. 
But with an adult, we don't see those changes. 
We see what appears to be a person kind of repeating themselves every day and sort of being the same for many, many, many, days. 
And yet, that is the outward appearance of a system that is constantly renewing itself. 
Every day, with eating, with sleeping, it is in constant building, from the cellular level on up to the full organism. 
This steady state, this idea of staying the same, is just what it looks like when there is a stable pattern of continuous growth and decay in balance. 
And it's easy to just look at it as this is staying the same. 
It's easy to neglect and ignore the idea of this continuous growth, because the overall appearances, and for ourselves, our internal feelings, can often simply feel the same. 
So it seems normal for us to begin the day by simply assuming, without any thought, that we are the same person we were yesterday. 
I mean, this is all very reasonable. 
And yet, at the lower level, underneath the surface at the basic level, there is this continuous growth and death and cycling, and we are continually changing every day. 
Again, something that we've probably all learned, but not something that we necessarily think about. 
I remember as a young child learning the idea that every cell in our body is completely different after seven years, so that after seven years, everything that you're made of is completely new material from what was there seven years ago. 
And I always thought that this was quite a fascinating idea. 
But I don't know if it's really sinking in to how I see things. 
I think it's much too easy to become comfortable with the steady state, the idea of being the same. 
And certainly, during my worst times of time-wasting escapism, this idea of staying the same is certainly a contributor. 
Because if you feel that, you know, this is just it, it's going to stay like this, it makes it more excusable, more forgivable, easier to waste a day. 
What's a day? But by becoming aware of this idea of continual growth, continual change, then we can't simply continue in sort of an automatic, default, inertial course. 
There's no choice but to change and develop every day. 
And all this came to my mind today because I had, as I talked about last time, went into a deep rest, where I took a long night's sleep and completely let myself completely rest from everything and just allow myself to wake up as a new person and say, I am going to restart everything. 
And, you know, I found today it was very difficult to get back into my routines of exercise and work. 
I felt like I had to start it up again. 
I had to once again make myself do something that I didn't want to do. 
And I had become very comfortable with my regular exercise routine, and I was happy with it for a period of several weeks, where I was just rolling through it with complete consistency. 
And not comfort in the sense- it was still uncomfortable to do the exercise, as any good exercise should be, not fully comfortable. 
But in a sense, I was comfortable with that routine. 
Today, I just had this inertial feeling of I don't want to do anything. 
And it made me realize that we really do have to renew what we're doing every day. 
There is no automatic continuation. 
There is no automatic repetition. 
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