Arrested Development

I overheard my mom talking recently. She’s a therapist (which I imagine will be fodder for maaany future posts) and for the last 10 years or so she’s been really big into developmental theory, or the stages of development everyone goes through spiritually, emotionally, etc. Mostly when she starts elaborating on these things, my eyes tend to glaze over and I start thinking about shoes, rearranging my furniture, or, y’know, cake, which is likely why, when I overheard her, she wasn’t actually talking to me (methinks she’s caught onto to the fact that I’m nowhere near as deep as she is). I don’t know who she was talking to, what they were talking about, or why this came up, but she said something to the effect of, “You know when you’re trying to make a decision and you’re going back and forth between what you know is the right decision and what you want-at-that-moment? When you’re saying, ‘This is going to be the best thing for me in the long run, but, oh, I just don’t want to do it!’ Well, that is an indication that you are in between two different stages of development, and you’re struggling to both progress to the next level of development and stay comfortably where you are.”

I’d love to say that this concept has stopped all less-than-stellar choices cold, but it hasn’t. What it has done is, now and then, helped me make the (shudder) mature(r) decision. Small things, really, but that’s where the big things come from. Or, to make Holly’s dad happy: from where the big things come.

Isn’t my mom smart?