When people grow, or learn some life lesson, sometimes they look back on where they used to be with distain. "How could I have been so stupid? It's so obvious! I must have been blind!" In rejecting their past self, they set up a paradigm that they are not okay unless they have learned certain lessons. And that paradigm leads to questioning if they have learned enough to be okay today. Maybe they are still "stupid" and "blind". This leads to the choice of an endless quest to make onesself perfect to escape the shame of our imperfection, or to becoming fundamentalist and believing that they finally have the right answers, and there is nothing more to learn.
If we reject where we used to be, we will also reject those we come across who are still there.
What we are trying to do is to be open to learning a new way of being without rejecting the old and judging it as bad. This means truly accepting ourselves right where we are now, with all our faults, pettiness, and insecurities, as perfectly okay. The motivation for learning is not to escape who we are, but rather the pleasure of pursuing a natural characteristic that we have - the desire to grow.
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