Everythingoes: Growing Pains
Growth is like the change of seasons. We don’t exactly know when autumn freezes into winter or when winter melts into spring. It’s a process in which the middle feels eternal, we grow accustomed to that season. At one point we begin to feel that a new season is upon us. We question just how much time has passed by. It’s shocking. Growth is often depicted as this grandiose thing, something that seems to come out of nowhere. It feels like a lot of the depictions of growth disregard the grueling process and provide just the outcome. However, Namjoon doesn’t do that. Namjoon emphasizes that growth is natural and just like everything in nature, it takes time. That, if there’s growth, there’s pain. That with every beautiful flower, the wilting process is inevitable. It isn’t something depressing. It’s comforting. It’s comforting because it shows that pain will never be a removable factor in the process of growth and that everyone and everything feels some variation of that pain. That although every breath we take is “prickling”, painful in its own way, each breath breathes life into us.
Acknowledging there’s pain makes the start beyond terrifying. It’s like jumping into cold water. However, growth often happens without our recognition. Sometimes we don’t realize just how much we’ve grown until we see an outcome. Just how the day slowly melts into the night. Nature slowly sheds different skins every season, but that allows for a different kind of beauty to emerge. Trees grow rings to show their age, one by one the rings start appearing. From roots struggling to survive a cold winter to the creation of a strong standing tree. That tree becomes a testament of endurance. Enduring pain, the change of seasons, of the world, to continue standing.
Growing, I would argue, carries a sense of grief along with it. We have to process what we’ve grown from. Sometimes that requires us to press on wounds we were attempting to ignore. To go back to the past and process is something that isn’t easily described with words. To put it simply, it is painful. Sometimes beyond painful. We often encounter the 4 stages of grief when we travel to past hardships. Denial, anger, depression, and finally acceptance. At least, that’s how it’d work ideally. Sometimes we have to work past our grief of what was and grow through it all. And somewhere in the process, we’ve accepted that we simply can’t change the past. That this too, like everything, will eventually pass. Perhaps that moment in time was a terrible crash. But I would argue, crashes teach us which ways to not land, while landings teach you that crashes aren’t the outcome of every fall. In the end we realize that everything will pass. Slowly but surely, winters become springs, nights become days, and crashes become landings.
