There are two directions in which a person can grow, and they are not in competition with each other, though almost everybody is trained thoroughly in one of them and left completely without instruction in the other. Nobody decided this. It is simply how our arrangements have come out.
One turns outward. It wants to know what is there, how it works, how it can be built upon and extended. Everything that has ever been discovered or made came from that direction, and there is nothing shallow about it. It is a genuine search, pursued seriously by serious people, and it has changed the conditions of every life on earth.
The other turns inward. It is interested in what cannot be seen and can only be felt. It discovers things within the person rather than in the world, and it is exactly as much a form of growth as the first. It is not measured by anything, which is why almost nobody notices its absence in themselves or in anybody else.
Only one of them is counted
Everything given to us from childhood onwards develops the outward direction. School, work, achievement, examination, the whole business of assessment from five years old to retirement. By thirty a person can be extraordinarily developed in that direction, capable, informed, effective, and genuinely accomplished by any standard anybody applies.
And in the other direction they may be exactly where they were at fifteen. Not because of any failing, and not through laziness. Because nobody ever mentioned it, nothing measured it, and there is no point in an ordinary life where its absence produces a consequence anybody can point to and name.
So a life can grow outward and stay entirely unchanged inward for four decades, and every external signal will report, accurately, that everything is going extremely well. There is no alarm anywhere in the system for this. There is no reason there would be, because nobody designed the system with it in mind.
What the missing half does
It does not announce itself, and there is no failure of any kind. What happens is that the outer life keeps expanding while the person inside it stays exactly the same size, and the growing gap between those two becomes the thing that cannot be explained to anybody.
They have more than they ever expected to have and feel considerably less than they expected to feel. They have solved problems that would have astonished them at twenty-five and cannot say what any of it was for. The capability keeps growing year on year and the person keeps not arriving anywhere.
And the natural response is to apply the only method they know, which is the outward one, harder. More projects, more improvement, more acquisition, another qualification. Which cannot possibly work, because the direction is wrong, and doing the wrong direction faster only increases the imbalance that produced the ache in the first place.
Both, not one
The correction people usually reach for is to swing entirely the other way. To decide that the outer life is an illusion, to withdraw from it, to treat ambition and comfort as things that must be renounced. That is not right either, and it fails in people who try it sincerely.
The world was made to be experienced. There is real beauty in it, in the things people build and the things they make and in ordinary comfort and ordinary work. Leaving it is not more honest than living in it. Somebody who abandons everything in order to look inward has still chosen one direction and refused the other, and the imbalance is exactly the same imbalance in a different costume.
What is worth wanting is both. To be fully in the outer life, doing whatever there is to do, and to give the inner one something more than the twenty minutes a year it usually receives. It is not a matter of dividing the hours evenly, which would be its own kind of nonsense. It is that one of them has never once been consulted about how the other is being spent.
