My friend and I came up with a phrase last year to use as a guidepost when talking about the things we are going through in our lives. Are you evolving or revolving? If you’re evolving then you have learned some lesson and are moving forward on your path in life. If you’re revolving then you didn’t learn the lesson or are still learning it. For me, revolving is like being on a merry-go-round. If you didn’t get it the first time around, you’ll go around again and have another opportunity to learn it.
As I’m writing this, I just realized that the conversations with my friend have been evolving! We spent a lot of time back in the day complaining about this or that and our conversations sometimes felt like they were just going in circles with no resolution (that tends to happen with complaining!). We would get together for dinner or be on the phone, talk yet again about the same things and in the end just felt tired and frustrated. That’s definitely not how you should feel after spending time with a good friend! At some point we decided enough was enough. We have more going on in our lives than those few things we were focusing on all the time. We made an effort to talk about other things in our lives. Don’t get me wrong, we still vent about things that are bothering us (we don’t want any stuck emotions!). However, we talk to get the emotions out, then ask what the lesson is and focus on that. We occasionally fall back into just flat out complaining (it’s easy to do!), but we came up with a solution. We agreed on a silly phrase that either one of us can say when we realize the conversation has become counterproductive. The silliness of the phrase breaks the intenseness of the conversation and allows us to step back, take a breath and refocus. We don’t get down on ourselves either if we have to use the silly phrase because we know it’s a process. This has been a few years in the making and we rarely have to use the silly phrase anymore! Our conversations have evolved and not only do we laugh more, but we also focus more on the positive things in our lives!
I believe that we each came into this life to learn, so there will be many merry-go-rounds as we each travel down the path of life. I recently got off one that I had been riding for a good part of my life. I didn’t even see that I was on it until one day, in a moment of frustration, I asked myself ‘why does this keep happening?’ Something clicked, I eventually figured it out and was able to move down my path. Soon after, someone came into my life who is teaching me something that builds on that former lesson. So now I’m taking a turn on another merry-go-round. The question is how many times will I go around on this one? I feel that becoming aware and knowing that you can either evolve or revolve is really important. Then when a lesson comes along you can step back and see it for what it is – a chance to learn. From that perspective maybe it will be easier to learn and you won’t go around on the merry-go-round too many times!
The beginning of a new year is a time when people take a look at their life – what they did in the previous year and where they want to go in the coming year. Of course you can do that at any time, but since we’re in the first month of 2015, why not take a look at what’s going on in your life. Where are you evolving and where are you revolving?
