Integration
Life is neutral. Growth begins when I choose to integrate its lessons instead of judging them.
To be a lifelong learner is to integrate as you go. Not in courses or certificates, but in the lived practice of reflection, allowing each experience to settle, to change shape, and to become part of who you are.
Photo by Taylor Vick on Unsplash
Dan Siegel and the PDP group, in their work on personality and wholeness in therapy, describe innate and relational developmental traits. In plain language, we keep growing as long as we stay active participants in our own becoming. Personality is not fixed. Character is not done. Life is the ongoing conversation between what we are born with and what we learn from others.
The Lens We Choose
You can spend a lifetime debating whether the glass is half empty, half full, or refillable. You can chase meaning through memes and mantras. But one truth remains: life continues until it doesn’t.
Whether by accident or design, it keeps unfolding. We can hasten its end through recklessness or despair, but most of us will not know when that end arrives.
So what do we do in the meantime?
We integrate.
All Events Are Neutral
A wise mind meets experience without rushing to label it good or bad. Events are neutral. It is our response that paints them with meaning, our interpretation that makes them gifts or wounds.
Integration is not about approval or acceptance of what happens. It is about learning what each event has to teach, then carrying that learning forward. It is an active process, not letting life happen to you, but letting it shape you with your consent.
Ask Yourself
What lesson is this moment offering me that I am resisting?
How am I choosing to interpret what has already happened?
What would it mean to live as a participant, not just a survivor, of my own life?
Growth does not arrive through comfort or avoidance. It arrives through integration, the steady, conscious stitching together of everything that has made you, into the wholeness of what you are still becoming.
Great point Alec. Talking on my behalf, but probably a similar thought for many, I still feel a "resistence" to what is happening when I believe it is "bad". However, living in a state of being ready and open to what will happen allows us freedom to choose our response. It takes a lot of work to do that consistently, but the first step is to not only accept that stuff happens, but be always ready to meet those difficulties (and good things) with a mindset of how I can best be. That takes discipline and constant self-awareness, which to me of 10 years ago was not something I wanted to take responsibility for. I just wanted things to be my way, and if they weren't. I wasn't aware that I had a responsibility to discipline my thinking. I thought, that's too much work. Now I see the opportunity in these difficult moments, but also in the "good" moments, to be humble and not want to look for acceptance and praise from others. It is liberating when you can let go of the need to be praised or accepted by others. Thanks for this reminder of the need to be consistent and self-aware all the time of how we work with what comes our way and what we are doing.