Growing UP and Growing Old

I read something this morning and what was being said resonated with me.  It is by an author called Rebecca Solnit in a book “Recollections of My Nonexistence” (the title I do not get). 
The quote follows but it was her thought that life is more than growing up that first got my attention.  It is growing whole that got me. 
She also talks about the development of an infant.  I confess I do not know much about such things, and I will need to fact check later with Merril who was a midwife.  I do love her sentence “Open enough to grow and closed enough to hold together is what a life must also be.”  Development and Protection.
Why I like that sentiment also is that my life to me must always have a sense of wonder.  A willingness to explore what is new.  At the same time, it needs protection.
It reminds me when I go into the yard to tend it.  In a sense I am going into the unknown (I do not know what I will come across) but I go with eye protection, gloves, and a hat.  I have a measure of protection for the task at hand.  Anything can happen but I do not want something to affect me that I should have protected myself against.
Her other thought I like, that I started this with, is the one about growing whole rather than just growing up.  Growing up seems is a given.  As a kid I thought my car track around the house for my toy cars was pretty cool.  Probably not appropriate for a 63 year old.
I do not want to grow up to a certain point and then have something stop my development.  To all intents and purposes I may look my age, but I can stop growing whole because I let a disappointment or hurt or something I do not understand stop me from reaching my potential.  I have had my share of the three, but I have chosen to not let the past hinder my future.  There will always be things that happen that rock me, yet to grow whole I need to go past yesterday and continue to reach for what lies ahead of me.  It is the only way I will reach my potential.
Anyway this is her quote:
"Growing up, we say, as though we were trees, as though altitude was all that there was to be gained, but so much of the process is growing whole as the fragments are gathered, the patterns found. Human infants are born with craniums made up of four plates that have not yet knit together into a solid dome so that their heads can compress to fit through the birth canal, so that the brain within can then expand. The seams of these plates are intricate, like fingers interlaced, like the meander of arctic rivers across tundra.​
The skull quadruples in size in the first few years, and if the bones knit together too soon, they restrict the growth of the brain; and if they don't knit at all the brain remains unprotected. Open enough to grow and closed enough to hold together is what a life must also be. We collage ourselves into being, finding the pieces of a worldview and people to love and reasons to live and then integrate them into a whole,…”
James Clear often has food for thought.  This has been one of those times for me.