Becoming Isn’t Linear

We like to imagine growth as a straight line: learn the lesson, make the change, move forward. But life has a way of bringing us back to familiar questions. What if returning to old ground doesn’t mean we’ve gone backward? In Edition #7 of The Aligned Journal, I reflect on gardens, seasons, old patterns, and the possibility that becoming may look less like a line and more like a spiral.

The path through my garden does not make much sense if you are trying to get somewhere.

There are three concentric circles cut into the ground beneath the trees. In front of them is an infinity loop, a figure eight that curves around two pollinator gardens. Farther in, near the center, is a small bird sanctuary. Depending on where I begin, I can walk toward it, away from it, around it, or spend quite a while moving without appearing to get any closer at all.

I suppose I could simply walk across the grass. Sometimes I do. But most days, when I go out there to walk, getting somewhere isn’t really the point.

I have walked those paths enough times that my feet know them. There are places where the ground dips slightly. Places where roots have begun pushing upward. A stretch where the trees open and the light changes. In late summer, the pollinator gardens become almost unruly, spilling toward the path as though the plants have forgotten where they are supposed to stop.

Some mornings I walk all three circles. Other mornings I begin and discover halfway around that I don’t want to continue. Sometimes I take the infinity loop twice. Sometimes I reverse direction for no reason I could explain.

There was a time when I thought I should have a proper way to walk it. After all, I created the garden. Surely the person who made the path ought to know the correct way through it. But the garden has never been particularly interested in my need for correctness.

If I begin on the outside circle, something curious happens. For part of the walk, I am actually moving farther away from the center. The sanctuary becomes more distant. The path bends outward. If I were measuring my progress by distance alone, I would have to conclude that I was going the wrong way.

And yet I am still on the path. I think about that sometimes when an old part of myself returns. A familiar doubt. An old habit of mind. The urge to take on too much because I know I can. The quiet tendency to measure a day by what I accomplished rather than by whether I was actually present for it.

These are not new discoveries for me. That is what makes their return so irritating. There is a particular disappointment in encountering something you thought you had already learned. We are patient with the things we don’t know. It is much harder to be patient with the things we believe we should know by now. I thought I was past this.

It is a sentence I have heard from other people many times. I have said versions of it myself. I thought I had learned to slow down. I thought I had become better at saying no. I thought I had stopped needing everyone’s approval. I thought I trusted myself more than this. I thought I had dealt with this.

There is almost always a little shame hiding beneath the words. We don’t simply notice that something has returned. We treat its return as evidence. Apparently, I didn’t grow as much as I thought I did. Perhaps that is because somewhere inside us there is still a graph. It rises neatly from the lower left corner to the upper right. We learned to read progress this way long before we started applying it to ourselves. Grades improve. Revenue grows. Careers advance. Miles get faster. Skills become more proficient. Projects move from beginning to completion.

Progress is supposed to accumulate. You learn something and keep it. You solve something and leave it behind. You overcome something and move on. There is something wonderfully reassuring about this arrangement. Life becomes a series of rooms we complete and then lock behind us. We can point to them and say: finished.

Except very little that matters seems to work that way. Grief doesn’t. Love doesn’t. Leadership doesn’t. Identity certainly doesn’t. And becoming may be the least linear thing of all. We learn something and forget it. We return to an old pattern. We make a courageous decision and then become frightened by what we have chosen. We establish a boundary and discover that keeping it is harder with someone we love. We become confident in one room and strangely uncertain when the room changes. We spend years learning not to prove ourselves, then enter a new season where nobody knows us and feel the old desire to prove ourselves rising again.

From the outside, this can look like regression. From inside it, it can feel worse. But lately I have been wondering whether we have mistaken repetition for return. The seasons have helped me with this. Every spring I walk outside and see ground I have seen before. The same beds. The same trees. The same paths emerging from beneath the winter debris. The hostas appear where the hostas appeared last year. The pollinator garden begins again. The weeds, faithful little creatures that they are, also return.

Nothing about spring seems embarrassed by this. The daffodil does not push through the soil muttering, Good grief, haven’t we already done this? The tree does not regard another set of buds as evidence that last year’s leaves were unsuccessful. Nature seems entirely comfortable with recurrence. Spring returns, but it is never the same spring. The tree is older. The roots are deeper. A branch was lost in a storm. Something planted last year did not survive. Something I had nearly given up on suddenly appears.

The garden revisits itself without repeating itself. Perhaps we do too. Years ago, I understood something about my tendency to be the person who could handle things. It is a role I know well. Throughout much of my professional life, I was often the calm one when situations became difficult. Give me the complicated case. The family-school conflict. The situation nobody quite knew how to manage. I learned how to stay steady when other people were not. It became part of my competence, and competence is a comfortable identity to inhabit.

There is nothing wrong with being capable. There is a great deal of good in it. But our strengths have shadows, especially when we stop noticing them. Being capable can quietly become being needed. Being needed can become doing things ourselves. Doing things ourselves can become staying behind the scenes, where usefulness feels safer than visibility.

I have understood pieces of this for years. And still, life keeps handing the lesson back to me in different clothing. The circumstances change. The work changes. The stakes change. I change. And there it is again. Not exactly the same lesson. The next ring of it. That distinction matters.

Perhaps the return of an old question does not always mean we failed to answer it. Perhaps some questions are large enough that they accompany us for years, revealing themselves according to what we are finally able to see. At thirty, a question asks one thing of us. At fifty, it asks another. At nearly seventy, it may ask something we could not have understood earlier because we had not yet lived the life required to hear it.

The question appears to be repeating. We are the ones who have changed. I find that comforting. It softens the harshness of I should be over this by now. Over is such an interesting word. We speak as though growth requires leaving ourselves behind. Over the fear. Past the grief. Beyond the uncertainty. Finished with the old pattern.

But perhaps some parts of us are not meant to be defeated and discarded. Perhaps they are meant to be met differently each time they appear. The younger version of me who learned to be useful does not need to be evicted from the house. He served me remarkably well. He helped me become a teacher, an administrator, a consultant, a coach, a leader. He knew how to show up when people needed him. I don’t need to defeat him. I simply don’t need to let him make every decision. That feels less like overcoming and more like integration. And integration rarely draws a straight line.

There is some comfort in knowing that this isn’t merely poetic language for making peace with our inconsistency. Researchers who study personal growth describe it as an ongoing, fluctuating process rather than a tidy sequence, one in which people move back and forth among different inner capacities over time. Research into psychological change has likewise challenged the assumption that meaningful change always happens gradually and predictably. 

The garden knew this before I did. Circles. Seasons. The infinity loop. I did not create any of them as a theory of human development. I put them there because they felt right. Only later did I begin to notice what they were showing me. Walk a circle and you return to familiar ground. But you are not the person who stood there on the previous turn.

Walk the infinity loop and you cross the center again and again, approaching it from alternating directions. Nothing about the path says that crossing familiar ground means you have gone nowhere. This is especially important during seasons when life appears to be moving backward.

A career shifts. Confidence wavers. Something that once felt settled becomes uncertain. A relationship asks a question you thought had been answered. An old fear shows up at precisely the moment you believed you had become courageous. The temptation is to compare ourselves with some earlier version of ourselves who seemed to be doing better.

Last year I was clearer. Six months ago, I was more disciplined. I used to know what I wanted. I thought I was farther along. Farther along where? That may be the more interesting question.

The language of personal development has borrowed so much from travel that we hardly notice it. We are moving forward. Falling behind. Getting somewhere. Losing ground. Reaching the next level. All of those images assume a destination and a straight road leading toward it.

But what if becoming is less like traveling a highway and more like tending a garden? Then the question changes. We stop asking, How far have I gotten? We begin asking, What is growing here now? That is a gentler measure, but not an easier one.

Because there are times when growth looks remarkably unlike progress. Sometimes growth is recognizing the pattern five minutes sooner. Sometimes it is noticing what you are doing while you are still doing it. Sometimes it is repairing a conversation instead of pretending it didn’t hurt. Sometimes it is discovering that the thing you thought you had outgrown still has something to teach you. Sometimes it is resting. Sometimes it is returning. Sometimes it is standing on familiar ground and realizing you are finally able to see what was there the entire time.

And sometimes growth may simply be the absence of the old judgment. The pattern returns, but this time you don’t attack yourself for having it. The fear returns, but you recognize its voice. The uncertainty returns, but you no longer confuse uncertainty with failure. The path widens away from the center, and you don’t immediately assume you are lost. That may be one of the quieter signs that something has changed. Not that the old thing disappeared. That your relationship with it did.

I am increasingly suspicious of any vision of becoming that requires us to abandon earlier versions of ourselves. We carry them with us. The child who learned how to belong. The young adult who discovered how to succeed. The professional who became competent. The person who learned to survive a loss. The leader who learned to carry responsibility.

They do not vanish when another version of us emerges. They become part of the soil. Some nourish us. Some need tending. Some need less water than we have been giving them. But they belong to the garden.

Perhaps this is why certain lessons return. They are not asking whether we remember the answer. They are asking who we are now when we encounter the question. 

• Can I be useful without needing to be needed?
• Can I lead without carrying everything?
• Can I be visible without performing?
• Can I rest without making rest productive?
• Can I trust the path even when it bends away from where I thought I was going?

I could not have asked all of those questions at earlier points in my life. I had not yet become the person capable of asking them. Which means the fact that they are here now is not evidence that I have gone backward. It may be evidence that I have come around again. On another ring.

The other evening I walked into the garden as the light was beginning to thin. The pollinator beds were still busy. A few bees moved among the flowers with the complete indifference of creatures that have no five-year plan. I followed one of the circles. For a while, the path carried me away from the center. I noticed it because I had been thinking about this essay, about our need to know whether we are making progress, about all the ways we measure ourselves against some imagined line.

The sanctuary disappeared behind me. Nothing in me needed to correct course. I kept walking. The path curved, as paths do. Eventually, the center came back into view. Not because I forced myself toward it. Because I stayed on the path long enough for the path to turn.

Perhaps there are seasons when that is enough. Not certainty. Not evidence that every step is taking us closer. Not the satisfaction of having finally mastered ourselves. Just the willingness to remain present to the ground beneath us. To recognize the place when it comes around again. To notice what is different this time. And to keep walking.

Reflection Question

What if something you thought you were repeating is actually something you are meeting at a deeper level?

A Gentle Practice

Sometime today, take five quiet minutes and think of something in your life that seems to have returned—a question, pattern, uncertainty, or feeling you believed you had already worked through. Resist the urge to solve it. Instead, notice what is different about the person meeting it now. You might quietly ask: What can I see from here that I couldn’t see the last time I stood in this place?

Continue the Conversation

Thank you for spending a little time here. If this conversation reminded you of someone who may need it, I hope you’ll share it with them. And if it stirred a question that stays with you, I’d love to hear it. Some of my favorite conversations begin after the writing ends.

— Michael

Questions Readers Often Ask

Is personal growth linear? Usually not. Psychological research increasingly describes personal growth as dynamic, iterative, and fluctuating rather than a simple sequence of steady improvement. People often revisit similar challenges while encountering them from different stages of development. 

Why do old patterns return after I’ve worked on them? An old pattern can appear in a new context or at a different stage of life. Its return does not necessarily mean previous growth disappeared. Sometimes, changed circumstances reveal another layer of something familiar.

Does returning to an old struggle mean I’m regressing? Not necessarily. Regression is possible, but recurrence alone isn’t proof of it. A useful question is whether you are relating to the experience differently—perhaps noticing it earlier, responding with more awareness, or judging yourself less harshly.

Why does growth sometimes feel like going backward? We tend to measure progress using linear ideas such as advancement, milestones, and completion. Human development is more complex. Periods of uncertainty, repetition, and even apparent disruption can occur within meaningful change. 

How can I tell whether I’m actually growing? Growth isn’t always visible in what happens. Sometimes it appears in your relationship to what happens: greater awareness, a different response, increased self-trust, or the ability to remain present with something that once overwhelmed you.