Outgrowing ourselves
On the illusion of living separate lives
While thinking about raising my children and what we pass on through teaching, an intense sense of what this means came to me. It was almost an image of us multiplying. Of becoming able to be in more places at once.
What we come to understand changes how we see the world and what we become able to do within it. When we help another person develop that understanding, it can become part of their judgment, their convictions, and their ability to act. Something that mattered enough for us to learn and live by becomes available through another life.
And that life is happening alongside ours. While we are occupied with something else, they can be recognizing what a situation needs, standing up for something, or helping someone find their own way forward. They do not need us there to tell them what to do. They have developed something of their own that they can live by. And through doing so, they can help someone else develop that too.
That was the scale of what I felt. Helping someone grow can change more than what happens within that relationship. It can increase our shared ability to understand, care, create, and act. What becomes possible through one life can become possible through many, simultaneously, in circumstances and forms none of us could have brought about alone. This is what I saw in that image of us multiplying: the capacity to contribute continuing to develop through other people.
Continuing through others
There is a psychological concept close to this: generativity. It concerns nurturing and contributing to succeeding generations, including through parenting and teaching. Psychologists Dan McAdams and Ed de St. Aubin describe how concern for the next generation can develop into commitment and action. The idea connects what matters to us with what we make available for others to carry forward.
John Kotre explored this in his book Outliving the Self. Through people’s life stories, he examined how we continue through what we give to subsequent generations. The title captures something of the scale I was sensing: our contribution can extend beyond the limits of our individual lives.
But the image that came to me was not only about what remains after we die. It was about what becomes possible while we are here. While I am doing one thing, someone who has learned something through me can be using it somewhere else.
The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh described this through continuation. He taught that we continue through the people who have received something from us, as well as through our own living body and mind. His students could continue his understanding through how they lived: their way of walking, working, speaking, and caring. Teaching was happening through the way he lived, as well as through what he explained.
find that a profound way to pay attention to what we pass on. When someone brings compassion into a situation partly because they experienced it through us, that care has continued. When something we helped them understand allows them to support another person, our contribution has become part of an action we are not there to take ourselves. It’s beyond obvious, in a way, but actively realizing these dynamics can feed our willpower.
When I picture that movement between us, how what we receive becomes part of what we give, changes through others, and sometimes finds its way back to us, I feel an intense sense of connection. We are involved in one another’s lives far beyond what we can see. Something of the care and understanding we have received can already be reaching people we will never meet.
How a contribution travels
Research offers a measurable example of how actions can travel beyond the people directly involved. James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis analyzed experiments in which people contributed to a shared fund while repeatedly being assigned to different groups of strangers. People who encountered greater cooperation subsequently contributed more in new groups. The influence also reached people who had never encountered the original contributor. In one version of the experiment, it extended through three links between people.
This was research on cooperation in a particular experimental setting. It illustrates how one person’s action can affect what others go on to do. In the piece on receiving, we explored how connections can bridge different circles. Here, that gives another dimension to what we pass on. The people we encounter have relationships and experiences beyond those we share with them. What they take from an encounter with us can enter a conversation with their child, a decision at work, or a community we have never been part of.
Our contribution can reach further because it becomes part of someone else’s life, with all the other people and possibilities that life contains. We do not need to be connected to everyone it may eventually help.
That carries a responsibility we all need to acknowledge. What continues through others can include the impatience or indifference we bring into an encounter. Our emphasis on individual achievement, and the way we have organized society around it, can make us lose sight of that. We become occupied with getting through our own demands, caught in an urgency we rarely question. We feel we have no time, become short with one another, and overlook what a moment of attention and conscious kindness in any interaction might make possible.
Keeping that image of our influence moving between us in mind can help us interrupt those defaults. It gives us a reason to question what we are treating as urgent and pay attention to the person in front of us. Every interaction carries a possibility. Being conscious of that can change what we choose to bring to it, and what we help continue beyond it.
That is how I understand outgrowing ourselves. Our contribution is no longer limited to the places we can reach or the actions we can take personally. While we are living our own lives, something we have helped make possible can already be happening elsewhere.
Fowler & Christakis (2010)
Kotre (1984)
McAdams & de St. Aubin (1992)
Thich Nhat Hanh (2017)