In The Reading Life, C.S. Lewis writes:

“The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we did in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? I now like hock, which I am sure I should not have liked as a child. But I still like lemon-squash. I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, I now have two. But if I had to lose the taste for lemon-squash before I acquired the taste for hock, that would not be growth but simple change.”

This passage can be extended to books as well: I now enjoy Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as well as fairy tales for “children”. If one had to lose the fairy tales for adult books, I would not call that growth, only that one had changed. A bus doesn’t grow by leaving one station behind and moving on towards the next. Growth is more like the tree that continuously adds rings, building upon what was previously there.

The reality is more complicated than this, of course. The process of growing usually involves some loss, especially with age. But loss is not the essence of growth, and certainly not what makes it precious. If it were, we should consider taking a train or becoming senile virtues of growth. Should we be congraulated on these things?

Some people like to define growth by the cost of it, and to make that cost far greater than it needs to be.