From Achievement to Maturity

For the Boundary of the Next Generation

I still remember a sermon I heard at twenty-three. It was preached by the pastor who would later become my father-in-law.

There was in the world a nameless man. No one recognized him; but if he went to one small village and taught the people there, and that small village was changed because of him — how precious a life that would be.— My father-in-law’s sermon, early 1990s

That one paragraph changed the direction of my life. Until then I had been measuring success by size. How widely known, how large. But that sentence held out a different measure: if no one recognizes you and yet one village is changed, that is enough. Thirty years later he suffered nineteen months with bile duct cancer and passed away. To the end he lived as he had preached. Sending him off, I understood one thing belatedly. When I first heard that sermon I thought that someday I should become that nameless man. But thirty years on, the order turned out to be reversed. He was the nameless man, and I was the small village. From a place no one recognized, he taught one person, and that one person was changed. What I want to say in this chapter is, in the end, an exposition of that sermon. What I want to hand to the next generation is not encouragement to swell larger.

I would like to carry that intention over into three words: achievement, growth, maturity.

Interestingly, all three Korean words share the character 成, to accomplish. But the second character parts their ways. 成果, achievement, takes 果, fruit — an outcome to be shown outside, an output measured and compared. 成長, growth, takes 長, to lengthen — growing from within, enlarging together with one’s structure. 成熟, maturity, takes 熟, to ripen — ripening when the time comes, and knowing how to withdraw. The power to leave something undone, described in Chapter One, bears its fruit here. Not the capacity to do anything, but the capacity to stop and to say no — that is maturity. The truly strong person Nietzsche drew was likewise not one who runs without rest but a person of leisure who moves calmly and slowly and detests excessive busyness. The person who swells without rest is closer to his last man than ever to an overman. A life whose goal is achievement always looks outward; a life that has reached maturity is aligned within. If growth asks how far I have come, maturity asks whether this road suits me.

This difference between growth and expansion was honed into one sentence for me by the education scholar Professor Seong-Hoi Lee. Growth is the widening of a boundary without loss of integrity; enlarging only in outward form, without integrity, is expansion; and expansion is death. When the inside grows along with the widening outside, that is growth; when the inside stays as it was and only the surface swells, that is an expansion toward death. The distinction we have been telling since Chapter One with balloons and trees, he named precisely in the language of scholarship.

Maturity, I have long thought, is the weight of a life shifting from outside to inside. Astonishingly, the historian Toynbee found the same thing in whole civilizations. The true growth he saw was the transfer of power from the outside — conquest and expansion — to the inside: the power to govern oneself. The psychologist Carl Rogers saw the same thing in a single person. The immature person always keeps the yardstick outside: how will others see this? In the mature person the yardstick moves inside, and he judges by the sense of his own heart. A historian and a psychologist, each from his own place, arrived at the same truth I had seen.

Here I want to bring out an old prayer. A man named Jabez appears briefly in Scripture and asks this: if you would bless me, enlarge my border. When I first heard this prayer I was uncomfortable. It sounded like a prayer for more and bigger. In this book’s language it looks like a prayer for expansion.

But look again at the word border. A border is the boundary of land. What Jabez asked was not to be swelled larger but to have his boundary widened. These are entirely different. Swelling is growing bigger while thinning; a widened boundary is a growth of what one can bear. A balloon’s skin thins as it grows; a tree’s bark thickens as it grows stout. So Jabez’s prayer is not a prayer for expansion but a prayer for growth. Not let me have more, but let me become someone who can bear more.

And here we must return to the question this book has deferred longest. Recall the swelling of Chapter One. That person who only swelled was afraid to give his best. Fearing real failure, he held his best in reserve and only swelled. Then how do we turn him from swelling to growing? The answer is unexpectedly paradoxical. Only by giving your best can you come to know your own boundary.

A boundary is knowing how far I extend. But the person who never gave his best never learns his own boundary. Placing himself inside the infinite possibility of “I would have done well if I had tried,” he can never know how far he actually goes. Not knowing his boundary, he does not know which way to grow. He merely swells in all directions. Expansion is the imitation of growth by one who does not know his own boundary. Conversely, only the person who gave his best touches his boundary. So this is how far I go. This wall is who I am now. Only the person who has struck that wall can take one more step from exactly that place. As muscle thickened at the place it was stimulated in Chapter Six, a person grows at the place he struck his own boundary.

A verified finite failure is always more alive than an unverified infinite possibility.

So there is only one sentence we must let go of: if only I had given my best back then. The moment that alibi is set down, the true sentence arrives. I gave my best. And that is enough. This is maturity’s destination, and another name for the 安息 we met in Chapter Eleven — the place where, precisely because one gave one’s best, one can finally say enough; the place of 息.

And yet after saying enough, one thing remains — the place this book has deferred longest. Up to here I have spoken all along of the side that gives. Chapter Fifteen spoke of letting go; Chapter Sixteen of being trodden upon. But the further one goes toward the end of life, the less that suffices. From some day onward, one must receive. Someone drives me, takes me to the hospital, sets out a meal.

For a person who has stood all his life on the giving side, this is hardest. “I don’t want to be a burden” rises to the throat. It sounds humble, but I am a little suspicious of that phrase. Beneath it there may be one last sentence still held: I must be the one who gives. That, too, is a place where one is still gripping.

Speaking of perichoresis in Chapter Thirteen, I said it is dwelling within one another. One another. What flows in only one direction is not perichoresis. So the person who cannot receive has not yet reached that place. Love is not only giving but also allowing oneself to be loved. Perhaps the last maturity is becoming able to say thank you.

The “Xici” commentary of the I Ching says: when exhausted, it changes; changing, it passes through; passing through, it endures. Reaching a dead end is not an ending but the beginning of change, and only what has so changed endures. That is what this book has been saying from the start. What only swells does not last. What lasts is what has rhythm — advancing and withdrawing, drawing in and letting out, growing and stopping.

Folded into six lines, the ground this book has covered comes out like this.

Survival kept the boundary.
Success made a place beyond the boundary.
Growth widened the boundary.
Maturity stood at the boundary and beheld the boundary.
Love opened the boundary.
And at the last, even that boundary is released.

I think now of the next generation. What I want to hand them is not encouragement to swell larger. It is an invitation to give their best and touch their own boundary. To be wounded at that boundary, to grow by that wound, to share that growing, and, having given all, to rest. To grow rather than swell. To be born within relationship rather than to stand alone. And that if no one recognizes you and yet one village is changed, that is enough. That is the boundary I want to hand to the next generation.

Notes for this chapter

Arnold Toynbee (etherialization) · Carl Rogers (internal locus of evaluation) · Carl Jung (individuation) · Friedrich Nietzsche (the last man) · 1 Chronicles 4:10 · I Ching, “Xici” commentary: qiong ze bian, bian ze tong, tong ze jiu