Read an Excerpt

SELF-DEVELOPMENT

As children, when someone asked our age, we might have said, “I’m four”, and added, with great solemnity, “and a half.” We didn’t want anyone to think we were only four. We had traveled so far in those few months, but then again, we were modest enough to sense that the huge dignity of turning five was still quite far away. In other words, as children, we were hugely conscious of the rapidity and intensity of human development and wanted clearly to signal to others and ourselves what dramatic metamorphoses we might undergo in the course of our ordinary days and nights.

It would nowadays sound comic or a touch mad for an adult to say proudly, “I’m twenty- five and a half” or “forty- one and three- quarters”— because, without particularly noticing, we’ve drifted away from the notion that adults, too, are capable of evolutions.

Once we’re past eighteen or so, our progress is still monitored but it is envisaged in different terms: It is cast in the language of material and professional advancement. The focus is on what grades have been achieved, what career has been chosen and what progress has been made in the corporate hierarchy. Development becomes largely synonymous with promotion.

But emotional growth still continues. There won’t be a simple outward measure: We’re no taller, we’ve not boosted our seniority at work, and we’ve received no new title to confirm our matriculation to the world. Yet there have been changes nevertheless. We may, over two sleepless nights, have entirely rethought our attitude to envy or come to an important insight about the way we behave when someone compliments us. We may have made a momentous step in self- forgiveness or resolved one of the riddles of a romantic relationship.

These quiet but very real milestones don’t get marked. We’re not given a cake or a present to mark the moment of growth. We’re not congratulated by others or viewed with enhanced respect. No one cares or even knows how caring might work. But inside, privately, we might harbor a muffled hope that some of our evolutions will be properly prized.

In an ideal world, we might have in our possession maps of emotional progress against which we could plot our faltering advance toward more sustained maturity. We might conceive of our inner developments as trips around a region, each one with distinct landmarks and staging posts, and as significant in their way as the cities of Renaissance Italy or the beauty spots on the Pacific Highway— and which we might be equally proud to have reached and come to understand our way around.