My 12-year-old son taught me a new word. He was explaining the phenomenon that happens in adolescence where a kid suddenly sprouts up when no one is watching.
They grow tall and muscled. They take on a new, attractive maturity and confidence that can’t help but be noticed and remarked upon by peers, bringing increased popularity and assurance.
The term he used for this transformation was “glow up.”
It has become my favorite magical thinking word for a very real process of growth and change. It delights me to picture all these awkward tweens metabolizing change and systematically growing into better versions of themselves, cell by cell. But I realized that the secret ingredient to the magic of the glow up is that it can’t happen under observation or scrutiny. It’s the break in routine that provides the opportunity to see someone with fresh attention and take in the transformation time away from previous versions of self has wrought.
I can name a few billion people who have suddenly been thrust into time away from previous versions of themselves, and their lives, without much outside social scrutiny. We’ve all wondered what the outcome of these months of global quarantine will be and I am loving considering this winsome lightning bolt: What if we are all in the process of a massive human glow-up?
What would dynamic personal transformation be for you? In those you love? On a planetary scale?
In my version, I see us glowing up with an increased connection to ourselves and our inner lives and values. I see us changing our relationship with time and the choices we make to fill it with and at what speed.
My ideal glow-up would equal greater discernment in how we all show up and why. We have been given this brief time to pause previous norms. It’s a beautiful invitation to focus on slow communion with our inner terrain. In my own life, which has suddenly been cleared of so many layers of distraction, I’ve been staring myself down, body and soul. I have been trying to see through to the who I am being when I am not doing. Untethering myself to notions of productivity as the driver of my value has been a big key to finding a new spaciousness where spirit lives.
It feels important to acknowledge that time contemplating oneself is at essence spiritual work, not navel-gazing narcissism. The root of any form of spirituality and spiritual practice is the quest for greater self-realization and self-actualization. There is no story of spiritual transformation that doesn’t involve questioning, lots of alone time, being “cast out” from normalcy, disintegration of stable foundations, ball busting your own status quo and reinventing what it means to live your life.
We honor our own divinity by learning the true sum of our own parts and how they can be best put to use in the cosmic whole. We all have a unique part to play but we need time to learn the role. And time is the thing that has been, until now, in seemingly short supply in our world.
I had a tiny gem of an experience a few weeks ago that was one of the most transformative things to happen to me during quarantine. I took time to lie on a blanket in my backyard to soak in the sunshine and warmth of a beautiful spring day. I had my eyes closed and became very aware of the intensity of the bird chatter happening all around me. I started focusing in on all the different types of calls and tweets, on the back and forth, call and response relationships being communicated. It was the first time I could hear and identify the individual voices, not just the chorus.
And in that moment I felt the click of the key in the lock. The sensation of everything being just as it should be, both transportive and grounding. I can’t prove it, but pretty sure I glowed up from that experience, not in measurable inches or firmer abs, but in spiritual bandwidth. I felt what else was possible to know in slowing down.
I predict humanity’s glow up will be slow and steady, not a firework display. It will be patience work like tending a campfire with wet wood. Ash in your face, blowing on embers, adding kindling, raking coals to stoke and maintain heat. But the hot, hot flame of individual and collective clarity that will light up a new world has already been born.
Wishing you the beautiful glow up you and our world deserve.
Alli Harbertson
Alli Harbertson, Cottonwood Heights, is an event-planner, writer and self-ascribed spiritual anthropologist. She writes a subscriber-based newsletter exploring modern spirituality called Clean Little Secret.