But no learning is harder, or more countercultural amid this cult of achievement and actualization we live in, than the realization that there is no final and permanent triumph to life. A generation after the poet Robert Penn Warren admonished against the notion of finding yourself and a generation before the psychologist Daniel Gilbert observed that “human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,” Gardner writes:
Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be,
an endless process of self-discovery,
an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves.
The purpose is to grow and develop in the dimensions that distinguish humankind at its best.
In a sentiment that mirrors the driving principle of nature itself, responsible for the evolution and survival of every living thing on Earth, he considers the key to that growth:
The potentialities you develop to the full come as the result of an interplay between you
and life’s challenges — and the challenges keep coming,
and they keep changing.
Emergencies sometimes lead people to perform remarkable and heroic tasks that they wouldn’t have guessed they were capable of.
Life pulls things out of you.
At least occasionally, expose yourself to unaccustomed challenges.
The supreme reward of putting yourself in novel situations that draw out dormant potentialities is the exhilaration of feeling new to yourself, which transforms life from something tending toward an end into something cascading forward in a succession of beginnings — for, as the poet and philosopher John O’Donohue observed in his magnificent spell against stagnation, “our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.” This in turn transforms the notion of meaning — life’s ultimate aim — from a product to be acquired into a process to be honored.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/15/gardner-self-renewal-meaning/