I was reminded this week of a beautiful quote from Anaïs Nin about what it takes for people to develop:

…and the time came when the risk it took to remain in a tightly closed bud became infinitely more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Genuine development is always this, an unfolding step in which we release what we’re clinging to and allow ourselves to open into a bigger kind of understanding, and a bigger kind of world.

It’s made possible by a letting go – of our defences, of a way in which we know ourselves and, most crucially, of our certainty.

We can resist this for a long time. But sometimes, if we’re lucky, we find out what Anaïs Nin is telling us, that something has to die in order for us to develop, so that something new in us can live.

Photo Credit: JefferyTurner via Compfight cc