“The hard thing when you get old is to keep your horizons open. The first part of your life everything is in front of you, all your potential and promise. But over the years, you make decisions; you carve yourself into a given shape. Then the challenge is to keep discovering the green growing edge.”
— Attributed to Howard Thurman
When we’re young, the future looks like an open field. We could become anything, live anywhere, love anyone. Then life begins its carving. We choose a career, a city, friends. We form habits and opinions and ways of standing in the world. Each decision helps shape and reveal who we are becoming.
The danger lies in believing the carving is finished. When that happens, we start living in the past. We replay old victories and old regrets, and we tell the same stories in the same words. Memory stops being a library we visit and becomes a house we never leave.
In yoga, we have our own word for what Thurman is pointing to: the edge. In any posture there’s a place where the stretch comes alive. If you back away from it, the pose goes dull and your mind drifts toward boredom. If you push past it, you strain, and fear takes over. At the edge itself, attention sharpens and the practice comes alive. That’s where flow happens.
The edge also moves. Some days it’s further out than others, and over the years it shifts. The point of practice isn’t to get back to where your edge was at twenty-five. It’s to find where it is today and meet it there with full attention. Your body has a green growing edge as long as you’re alive.
Goals are how we find that edge in the rest of our lives. A wise goal is sized to keep us there: hard enough to banish boredom, gentle enough not to flood us with anxiety. It points forward, toward something we love, and pursuing it is its own reward. We enjoy the journey for its own sake, and arriving matters less than it once did.
There are many kinds of toxic goals, but perhaps the most dangerous are rooted in the past and revolve around maintaining the status quo. They leave us with nothing to gain, so we’re bored, and everything to lose, so we’re anxious. One of the secrets of aging gracefully is to keep choosing new goals rooted in the future, in becoming. With goals like these, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. They help us find flow, and even the occasional peak experience.
Goals can be large, like planning a trip around the world. Or they can be small, like learning sign language or finally reading Moby-Dick. Direction matters more than size. And each small promise you keep builds trust in your own word, which makes the next step easier.
None of this means throwing the past away. The past is soil. Thurman described roots working quietly in the dark, preparing for new leaves. Our experience, our mistakes and our hard-won wisdom feed the growing edge, but they aren’t the growing edge. A tree draws from its roots. It doesn’t try to grow back into them.
And somewhere between nostalgia for what was and anxious striving for what might be, there’s this moment, the only one in which anything grows. Yoga calls the ability to rest here santosha, contentment. A wise goal doesn’t pull us out of the present. It gives the present something to lean into.
So here’s a question to carry with you this week: Where is your green growing edge today? And what is one small, wise goal that would help you lean into it?
