Winging It.

Somewhere around fifty million years ago - give or take the casual margin of error with which only part-time Paleontologists and sloppy, tropical architects appear comfortable - a small semi-feathered dinosaur looked down at its short little arms and thought... Absolutely nothing at all.

It didn't ponder for a second, and ask "are those arms still useful?" Nor was there a debate around them falling off to make room for wings, to serve the higher purpose of flight.

It did not set an intention for its little arms, journal intimately about their limitations, or stand before a bathroom mirror singing "I believe I can fly", into a hairbrush. There were no podcasts on becoming the best Jurassic version of yourself, no weekend dinosaur retreats involving cold water and firey breath work, and nobody had yet written the bestseller "Grow your Wings in Thirty Days".

The hapless creature simply went about the all-consuming business of remaining hidden and therefore uneaten while, somewhere inside the great untidy experiment of evolution, things were...well...evolving.

Eventually – and I use that word with some generosity, as there was no doubt a big million-plus years of "in between" - stubby arms became a bit more wing-like, feathers found purpose beyond keeping their owners warm, and descendants of creatures that had spent millions of years regarding gravity as just one of those things, began to defy it.

Evolution, you see, had time. Thousands of Millenia in which to experiment, screw up, wander into the wrong meeting of Mother Nature and occasionally produce something so spectacularly ill-conceived, that evolution itself would blush at the gaffe.

There was no urgency and definitely no deadline. No girly lunches asking the little theropod when it planned to get serious about "the whole wing thing"...

We the people, on the other hand, us Humans, appear to have been allocated about eighty years. Ninety, at a push - if we eat our sprouts, obey our fit-bits and adopt a permanent attitude of gratitude.

Within this fourscore years and ten - God's rather less generous window - we are expected to arrive naked and helpless, learn a language, survive High School, find work, understand money, fall in love, have kids, get a messy divorce and select a mid-life crisis "from the following options"...

And we are to complete this emotional Japanese game show, while still actively ensuring that we remain emotionally available, sufficiently mature, deeply aware, eco-contributing members of society with no Daddy issues... That seems to be a much bigger ask than what was required of the short-armed-archaeopteryx.

It seems, on the face of it, a wildly unfair contract. Nature never once asked the animals to actively evolve - it was all done for them. We on the other hand, may be the first creatures required to participate consciously (and constantly) in our own inner transformation - on a ticking clock - while possessing just enough self-awareness to know precisely how poorly we appear to be doing.

I find this both very funny and quite annoying, often within the same afternoon. We are sometimes guilty of applying too much pressure to the nanometers of our own evolutionary possibilities.

The modern self-improvement industry has not exactly helped. Entire bookshops promise transformation in thirty days or 12 steps, Seven Simple Lessons and a handful of Promises that will arrive by email, by lunchtime. There is an implicit accusation behind much of it that if change is possible at all, it ought to happen rather quickly.

Nobody did this to the dinosaur. Nobody explained that its inability to fly might simply be a limiting belief inherited from its parents who, to be fair, couldn't fly either.

It had several million years in hand.

We seem to give ourselves until next Tuesday.

There is another small disadvantage we tend to overlook, which is that we spend a good many of our precious eighty or ninety years acquiring the very programming we will later be encouraged to dismantle. Long before we are capable of questioning anything, we are learning what love feels like, what success is, what makes people angry or sad, what keeps them close and what version of ourselves needs to show up to what occasion.

As children, we are extraordinary adaptation machines. If being quiet keeps the peace, we learn quiet. If achievement earns affection, we achieve. If making everybody else happy makes the room feel safer, we are born to please. In short, we fake it 'till we make it.

These are not necessarily weaknesses; at the time, they may be brilliant solutions to the particular emotional climate in which we find ourselves.

This might all be rather more bearable if we treated self-betterment as afternoon tea, rather than a hot-dog eating contest.

Somewhere along the way it became both an urgent moral obligation and a lifestyle brand, complete with its own vocabulary, a fair amount of beige leisure-wear, and a dozen distinct morning routines, several of which apparently require standing outside, arse-deep in cold water before sunrise, alone, on purpose, and very grateful.

It's more pressure than the dinosaurs were under. We no longer allow ourselves to simply to be people muddling through reasonably well, experimenting with evolution - or not. We feel we need to be healing, growing, evolving, manifesting, optimising and upgrading, preferably visibly enough that everyone knows we're on the journey, while somehow not appearing to put in too much visible effort, which would rather give the game away.

We have convinced ourselves that we should be more present, more resilient, less reactive, better boundaried, properly hydrated, financially secure, physically flexible and spiritually awake. We must heal the inner child, regulate the nervous system, understand our attachment style, practise gratitude, release resentment, embrace vulnerability and somehow still remember the two-step authentication protocols for online banking.

That is a lot of pressure...

So how do we right size our personal transformations, to be tasks that fill the time available, rather than make them feel like we need to finish the Seven Labours of Hercules before bed? Nowhere here, will you find me suggesting that we abandon the work altogether, because I genuinely believe that becoming more conscious of ourselves is a very big part of why we are here. But perhaps we might stop insisting that every single, quiet moment has to contribute towards the project.

Sitting quietly is allowed to be just sitting quietly. A walk does not have to become a hike towards mindfulness, measured in steps and improved by a podcast about the monogamy of penguins. We can stand beneath a tree without explaining to a group of Asian tourists that we are, in fact, currently grounding ourselves. We are allowed go to bed early, simply because we're knackered.

Not everything has to heal us. Some things are allowed merely to please us.

There must be something inherently exhausting about turning every ordinary pleasure into another piece of personal development. Perhaps we could trust, like the Dinosaurs did, that some of the evolving happens anyway. Quietly, invisibly, while we're busy living rather than monitoring the quality of the life being lived.

And maybe we could extend ourselves something of the same kindness – to accept that we are unfinished without concluding that we are therefore inadequate; to remain interested in becoming better without treating the person we are today as an embarrassing prototype of the person we're supposed to become.

That's the ticket.. the mini-saurus was not a badly drawn bird. It was simply where evolution had reached that afternoon.

And perhaps, for today at least, so are we.

For there will always another bit of us requiring attention. Another habit to break, wound to heal, boundary to establish or belief to release. Even rest has become something that has a right way and a wrong. We don't simply go for a walk anymore; we practise mindfulness. We don't sit quietly; we meditate. We don't have an early night; we prioritise recovery. Somewhere along the way, even eating a ham and cheese sandwich acquired performance indicators.

And if you're not careful, you will find there is no finish line. Which is perfectly fine in principle, except that everyone else appears to be headed briskly towards it like Scandinavian speed-walkers, and occasionally glancing sideways over their Ryvita, to see how we're getting along.

The dinosaur was never once made to feel behind. Nobody circulated a study suggesting that the average theropod ought to have achieved functional flight by the year whatever. No feathered rival built a personal brand around having got there rather ahead of schedule. More importantly, nobody looked at those rather disappointing little arms and suggested there was a more evolved version of itself waiting to be unlocked.

Today just seems like one of those days where my enthusiasm for self-improvement has lost its way or gotten a stitch. Growth does not necessarily require dissatisfaction with the thing that is growing. Nature seemed perfectly content to allow the creature to be exactly what it was, while simultaneously allowing it to become something else.

All in good time.

We seem to have forgotten that the two can coexist.

Perhaps that is enough of an evolutionary ambition for one afternoon. To remain actively curious and purposeful about what we might become, without being quite so disappointed by what we are today.

The little dinosaur, after all, had no idea there was a bird somewhere in its future. It simply got on with being a perfectly adequate dinosaur, short arms and all, while nature quietly took care of the rest.

Maybe we could afford ourselves a little of the same patience.

There is still work to do, of course. There probably always will be. But we don't have to do it by Tuesday.

On Platform 13, wholeness isn’t found - it’s remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.