Growth Is Not a Leap, It's a Slow Unfolding - Becoming begins the moment you start nurturing what’s already inside you

For a long time, I carried around this quiet desire to become a writer, someone whose words travel and whose essays and thought pieces settle softly in other people’s minds. I imagined a future where my name rested on a book spine like a small, personal victory.

But every time I pictured that future self, another voice arrived first. A smaller, sharper one. The one that insisted my writing wasn’t ready, my speech wasn’t polished, and my ideas weren’t nearly as profound as I hoped. So instead of writing, I hovered at the edge of the dream, circling it like someone knocking on a door they’re too nervous to enter.

Some days I wrote a sentence, other days I only thought about writing. Somehow both felt like progress and non-progress at the same time.

The Philosophy That Rearranged My Interior World

Then I stumbled across Aristotle’s idea of potentiality and actuality — through Will Durant, while trying to understand philosophy without accidentally putting myself to sleep. And there it was: a simple idea with the gravitational pull to rearrange everything inside me.

Everything, Aristotle claimed, is always moving from potential to actual.

An acorn is potentially an oak tree.
A lump of marble is potentially a statue.
A person who wants to write is potentially a writer. (My addition)

When I read that, something clicked. It was one of those ideas that feels less like new information and more like a truth that had been following you quietly, waiting for the right moment to reveal itself.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

The Seed Was Already There

My wish to write wasn’t just a wish. It was a seed. It already carried the form of what I wanted to become, even if from the outside it looked like nothing at all. The only difference between the acorn and the oak is time and cultivation. And the only difference between a potential writer and an actual writer is practice.

Not dramatic transformation.
Not inspiration striking like lightning.
Just daily, slightly clumsy, slightly hopeful cultivation.

So I started showing up. I filled notebooks without worrying if the sentences were brilliant or even coherent. I wrote captions. I wrote posts. I wrote unfinished drafts. I wrote things that made me cringe and things that surprised me. It was messy, but it was movement. And movement is the bridge between what is possible and what becomes real.

That’s when I realized something comforting: the future version of me I admired, the one who writes with confidence and clarity, isn’t some distant stranger. She already exists in potential form. She’s in every paragraph I attempt, every thought I try to express, every moment I step toward the thing that calls me.

The Self Emerges Slowly, Like an Unfolding

Reading Aristotle’s thoughts on potentiality and actuality revealed a simple but profound truth: nothing in nature jumps into its final form. Everything unfolds. Everything becomes. The form of a thing lives inside it from the beginning.

You don’t look outside the acorn to understand the oak.
You study the acorn.
You nurture it.
Eventually what was hidden becomes visible.

This isn’t just philosophy. It’s a way of understanding yourself.

The version of you that you hope to be isn’t somewhere far away, waving from a mountaintop. It’s already inside the version of you that exists right now. Your confidence, your voice, your craft, your clarity — they’re all present in early, undeveloped form.

Potential isn’t emptiness.
It’s fullness that hasn’t been shaped yet.

The Work Is Not to Prove, But to Cultivate

When I understood this, writing stopped being about proving myself. It became an act of cultivating myself. Every attempt was part of the unfolding. Every effort was part of what I was growing in the dark, slowly, steadily.

I didn’t need confidence before creating.
Confidence would grow because I created.

And so here’s what I’ve learned, and what I hope you take with you:

Whatever desire lives inside you is not random.
It is a clue.
It is the early shape of something that already exists inside you in potential form.

Whether you want to build a business, paint, teach, speak, lead, create, explore, heal, or reinvent yourself, the seed of that future is already present in you now.

You don’t need to know how it will unfold.
You don’t need to feel ready.
You don’t need to feel extraordinary.
You only need to cultivate what is already there.

If you have a desire, you have the potential.
And if you have the potential, all that’s left — beautifully, quietly, courageously — is to grow it.

Cynthia A. Murungi

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