Mummies in the audience

“Keep on growing,” the commencement speakers say. “Don’t go to seed. Let this be a beginning, not an ending.” It is a good theme. Yet a high proportion of the young people who hear the speeches pay no heed, and by the time they are middle-aged they are absolutely mummified. Even some of the people who make the speeches are mummified. Why?

The thing that is really blocking self-development – the individual’s own intricately designed, self-constructed prison, or to put it another way, the individual’s incapacity for self-renewal.

John Gardner, Self-Renewal