On our way to Church last Sunday, Wanja, my 9-year-old, alluded to her growth as we ‘gossiped’ and laughed about her father who has been away on an assignment.

Wanja had not cried over his absence.

She reminded me she would cry if we visited a relative and had to leave, and how she would be hysterical over her father’s travels, or even when her brother needed to go to boarding school.

“These days, I feel bad only. I don’t cry…that’s how I know I am growing.”

Wanja said this with a sense of accomplishment and deep satisfaction on her progress.

Later, I thought about our professional lives and what milestones we set and look at and can glowingly say, “I am growing.”

I like that it is in the present continuous tense and that growth can have nothing to do with age but rather time. While the two are factors of each other, I think we should separate them and look at each as independent. There are things we can and should achieve with age, and there are things we can and should seek to grow in, with time.

Sometimes growth is not a deliberate choice but a lack of it can be. It can be because of the choices we make or do not make, the opportunities we do not take advantage of, a level of ignorance or just the bliss of letting each day pass by.

Six months and a bit into the year 2022, it is not late to seek growth. The English author William Penn is quoted as having said “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” What better way to use our time that to seek answers to five key questions:

1. What do I want to grow?
2. Why do I want to grow it?
3. How do I grow it?
4. How will I know I am growing?
5. How do I keep growing?

The first question alludes to a variety of options we can grow, and conversely, the last shows the infiniteness of that process.

We may want to grow our patience. We may want to grow how we treat others. We may want to grow our self-mastery, our professions, our options, and so forth. We may want to help others on their growth path and nudge out of stuntedness. But we also need to figure out how we grow and how to keep at it.

Of value, is keep it continuous tense, and like Wanja, declare, “I’m growing.”