growing up &whatevers

I wonder if "growing up" simply means growing more and more "human" as we proceed through more and more of life, like becoming bigger- and bigger-hearted into the beings we were made to be.  Each life decision widens us; each big event expands our capacity to feel and then to empathize.  The highs and the lows are higher and lower as we grow older and more profound in our thinkings, feelings, the scope of our sandboxes.

Once you have fallen head over heels in infatuation, once your heart has been (seemingly) irreparably shattered, once you become responsible for a little life and a little soul whose growing-up you're put in charge of for a short little while, you get to tuck away each of those experiences into its right corner in your now-expanded heart, in spaces that hadn't existed before because there was nothing for them to hold.

You go through a shattering experience; it makes you feel more terrible than anything you had ever imagined even possible, and that's just fine because it's exactly right, how confusingly new this feels. That's how that new hurt is supposed to sting; those neurons just hadn't been fired ever before.  And through all of this, your spectrum of brokenness grows wider, and as does your spectrum of empathy.  Same with love.  And becoming a mom or a dad.  And your first-ever bite of chocolate, probably.  How could you rave about the wonders of the cacao bean without having tasted a sliver of its sugar-powered magic?

Makes tragedies seem that much less intimidating, that much more purposeful.  Makes future joys that much more exciting to look forward to.

But the key here is that you have to have those [shattering/falling/heart-expandingly delicious] experiences first, and suffer appropriate[ly beautiful/tragic] consequences for those choices.  To have courage to reach out and touch things previously unseen, to declare unabashedly that you are of This Camp or That, to decide to let go or hold on, whichever is scarier.

Someone described the concept of predestination to me by explaining that "you're chosen by God (like, since the beginning of eternity) once God chooses you." It sounds circular and probably makes philosophers jump up and down in illogical rage, but this weirdly makes sense to me; like in a this is sort of the only way it would make sense way.  Like how you have to reach out to touch someone who is reaching out to you for there to be a real connection, a genuine falling in love, but you know you were supposed to be together since the beginning of the stars or whatever.

Or whatever.

Stars or eternities or predestined love stories since the beginning of all galaxies, or whatever.

Why does everything always end up being about love?  Ohhhh English major.