Many years ago, my daughter asked me a question that has stayed with me: “Mom, what are you going to be when you grow up?” At the time, it was charmingly simple, the kind of question a child asks, expecting a straightforward answer. Now, when I look back on it, I see it as an invitation to reflect on a life that has never felt finished, a life that keeps unfolding in ways I could never have planned.
I still don’t have an exact answer. The truth is, I think I am always growing up. Each day brings something new — an experience, an insight, a relationship, a challenge — and each of those things reshapes who I am in small but meaningful ways. Growing up, for me, is not a destination to reach and then stay put; it’s an ongoing process. Even when my body tires and my hair grays further, even if I find myself slowing down physically, I imagine the inner work of my soul continuing. I do not picture a final “grown” state where everything is settled and complete. Instead, I see a continuous becoming, like a river that never quite arrives at the same place twice.
I’ve lived my life with a sense, sometimes faint and sometimes vivid, that I have been here before. Some memories and feelings carry the flavor of other times and spaces, as if my soul has inhabited different lives and different eras. That sense of many lifetimes doesn’t feel like a puzzle to solve so much as a vast texture of learning and remembering. It makes me believe that the learning I do now is not limited to this particular stretch of time on Earth. The things I learn, the love I give and receive, the ways I fail and try again — all of it becomes part of a larger thread that continues beyond this one life.
When I say I will take this experience and these days with me into the next dimension or afterlife, I mean that metaphorically and spiritually. I don’t think the person I am now will vanish like a story erased from a page. The core of who I am, my heart’s inclinations, my capacity to feel and to understand, my lessons and my teachings, feels like something that endures. My soul, my source, seems to be an evolving student and teacher at once. Even if my current body retires, the inner life I have cultivated, the compassion, curiosity, and my hard-won wisdom, will not simply stop. There is a continuity to being that feels comforting and expansive.
This perspective changes how I answer my daughter’s question now. Instead of naming a profession or a role, I tell her that I will continue to be myself by whatever form “myself” takes. I will keep learning. I will keep teaching. I will keep making mistakes and making amends. I will keep marveling at small miracles and grieving real losses. Growing up, for me, means embracing the idea that life is a school without graduation, a journey without a final map. That’s what I will be when I grow up: a perpetual student of life, always becoming, always returning to love and curiosity. For the Love of God, Source, and Respect to Everyone, I do what I do to help bring love and peace, connection to your Source, which is a part of mine and everyone and everything.
