Unattainable Goals and Growth

Coming to college I set 3 goals. One was to graduate and have a job. Check. Two was to find friends that I would want to spend the rest of my life with. Check.  Three was to find myself, my identity. Empty box.  The truth of the matter is I failed, I didn't discover who I was, I didn't have this dawning understanding that ended with "yup that's you Matty".   But the reality of the situation is that I set an unattainable goal.  A goal that I could never reach, that isn't reachable.  Knowing who you are is a process, its not a new stage of enlightenment, its like a flower unfurling its petals at the start of every spring only to have them die at the end of fall,  a microcosm of birth and death. As parts of us grow out of the things we once knew and loved, our core kills off those parts of us, replacing them with new growth in different and new areas.

If identity is a process and always shifting how can you know it? Exactly, how can you know it? the knowledge is not easily obtainable, but what is obtainable is the understanding of our growth patterns.  What exactly does that mean? Well think of a Sun flower, it has no conception of how it grows, but year after year, cycle after cycle, it keeps becoming a more mature and complete Sun Flower, eliminating its diseases,  growing stronger & taller to adapt to it's surroundings.  But imagine the Sun Flower was uprooted from it's place of growth in say a field and was then put in a forest without sunlight, a place of decay for it.  The core of the Sun Flower may come back cycle after cycle and not know how, but it will never be stronger then the year before.  This is what I mean by growth patterns.

 The core essence of us can only be glimpsed at through interactions. As a person we can know where we're at, we can know how we feel, we can know how others make us feel. That is as far as certainty goes.  But what we can definitely see is how our physical surrounding effects us.  The people, the places, the decisions we make, all of it affects us. This we can map, I like to hang out with these type of people, I like to do this on the weekends, I find enjoyment in this, I feel a sense of fulfillment at this place in my life.  And so like the Sun Flower we grow, we go through many seasons of ups and downs, but growth happens.  It is our job to find that place that we can grow even if we don't know how it's happening.  And not set unattainable goals that can derail us from that growth.