Don't waste time charting your growth.

"Personal growth is not like the development of a new skill.  It does not take place in observable increments that can be measured and charted.  Indeed, when we're growing in sensitivity, generosity, and compassion, we're not aware of it, because we're not focusing on ourselves.  The recovery of emotional freedom simply does not have the quality, for most of us, of a controllable or measurable sequence of transformations.  It's more a lifelong career of discovering further blindness and weaknesses in ourselves, shedding them in turn, such that we might do the right thing more consistently for the benefit of others."

"Unless we change inside our own hearts toward the people we struggle with here and now, we are condemned to struggle with whomever we may find ourselves associating with.  It doesn't matter what external circumstance we may change.  We will be the same; we will interpret our world the same way, and others will respond to us the same way.  The details of our days may distinguish themselves from one another, but their substance will not change until we do - 'wherever you go, there you are'." -- C. Terry Warner

Thank you, C.H., for gifting me with Bonds That Make Us Free.  I am thoroughly enjoying it.  What I've gotten out of these passages is very powerful - that personal growth is not a measuring stick that we use to monitor our progress or to compare ourselves with others.  What misuse of a sacred path that would be. 

Instead, it is a journey through self to better prepare ourselves for self-less love and service to others.  The minute we find ourselves judging others' problems or progress, we have abandoned the path and are simply creating more of what we've always known.