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# Growing Up Twice
- URL: https://seeingbeyond.tech/growing-up-twice/
- Published: 2026-09-24T17:13:05.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-24T17:13:05.000Z
- Description: Life can, in fact, truly begin again when we’re older. Growing up is never really a finished task.
- Author: Diane T Adams
- Tags: #Sense of Life Recipes, Sense of Life Recipes

When we’re kids, all we want to do is grow up. Every game is about what we will be, how life will be, when we are finally “there.” It is not just children who have this urge. Everything that lives on earth grows up in one way or another. The urge to reach toward the endless sky, to stand in the sun and tilt your face to its rays, to feel the movement within yourself toward some greater goal—all this desire for growing up does not stop once the body has finished growing. The call to grow simply changes form.

Human beings have the unique privilege to grow up twice: once physically, and again spiritually. When physical growth is finished, the real growth of our being is actually just beginning. Spiritual scientist Rudolf Steiner described an ideal process of spiritual growth in this way:

“Thus, at the age of thirty-five, the human being gains his independence. He enters the age in which he not only experiences things but also strengthens and consolidates what he has experienced inwardly. \[…\] Knowledge can be acquired beforehand, but wisdom is something that must be developed from within. The Age of Jupiter then begins at the age of forty-nine, during which the soul becomes even freer within itself by surrendering the body even further to its own devices and developing within itself the qualities that contain the best powers for transitioning into the Age of Venus, which begins in the sixty-third and sixty-fourth years of life. By then, the inner self has consolidated to such an extent that the human being, through beautiful development, can have shed all outward egoism. By then, he has only love for what exists in the world. He no longer wants anything for himself; he is now there for those around him.”

Unlike the first phase of human development, the growth of the spiritual nature has to be consciously cultivated. This is hard to do within a culture that teaches reductionist materialism as absolute truth. The culture wants to replace the natural and necessary phase of spiritual development with the manufactured need to obtain more stuff—a trap many have fallen into, and a place from which it becomes impossible to be satisfied with life. The latter half of life must be spiritualized, or else!

To grow spiritually, it is necessary to consciously map what we need to learn and how we are going to learn it. At the end of life, we ought to have become mature spiritual beings who give back to the world the light we have gained by pursuing growth in the light of our inner sun.

This trajectory will expose you to the disapproval of those around you. It may create angst and even, at times, outright anger in those who have chosen to remain spiritual children.

Regardless, the second phase of life and growth demands upward growth just as much as the first path of childhood calls for the body to grow taller. We are still growing up, even when we are old. Life can, in fact, truly begin again when we’re older. Growing up is never really a finished task.