Becoming Isn’t Linear

A curving garden path disappearing and reappearing among mature plants, representing the nonlinear nature of personal growth and becoming.

We tend to imagine growth as a straight line: once we have learned something, changed something, or moved through something, we should not have to meet it again. But becoming rarely works that way. Sometimes the return of an old question or familiar pattern does not mean we have gone backward. We may simply be encountering familiar ground from a different place in ourselves.