Owning the path – fractal evolution

As you live, you evolve, personal evolution happens, whether you’re aware of it or not. Are you paving your path of personal evolution, or is it simply happening to you? This is an important question to answer, or rather – to what extent are you paving your path in life and the world? 

If you let life happen, neglecting your possibility to choose what you do with yourself and the gift of life given to you, your power to change yourself or the world around you is relinquished.

Your personal evolution is like the fractal aspect of the evolution of life on earth and cosmic evolution. It is a smaller aspect, but one you can direct in the directions you choose.

Paving your path – pacing yourself

If you know where you’re going, it would be good to pace yourself. Measure as best you can the pace at which you are evolving. 

There is a truth in numbers you cannot assess based on your feeling of the path. The first step in carving the way is to determine where you are and what you need to leverage your evolution towards where you plan to grow. 

Where to start?

Sometimes the path is not clear to us, most of the time, come to think of it. There’s a simple solution to that. Start where you are. Be as truthful as you can about it. Look at reality in the face. If you look attentively enough, you discover it has a spiritual nature too, which is vital to your personal evolution.

The simple solution goes like this:

Look at what does not work. That’s easy. We tend to notice what’s wrong, what doesn’t work, and what we can’t stand and do not wish to experience anymore. 

That’s where you start with what you are tolerating.

Thomas J. Leonard – the father of coaching, in his brilliant book “The portable coach,” said: “Tolerations often represent compromises you’ve talked yourself into.”

Go for not tolerating anything anymore. 

Make a list of what you’re tolerating right here and now. Then, as systematically as possible, eliminate your tolerations one by one. It may take time. It may take a year or more. Just keep at it.

How to proceed?

The more tolerations you eliminate, the more a view of your evolutionary path becomes clear to you.  

You will start seeing the other side of that coin, of your existence. You no longer see what you do not want – you start seeing what’s at the other end of that stick – what you do want.

For example – I decided not to clean after the members of my household anymore on a regular daily basis. It suddenly freed up time to concentrate on what interests me at the moment – researching the next outdoor adventure and pacing my running evolution more systematically. 

The other side of the coin

Oh, I also started learning to play the Irish flute. What lay at the other side of the coin of my existence was having more time to do more and more of what I wanted to do with my life and not what I had been tolerating for a long time. 

For years I tolerated the mess around the house, thinking: “This bothers only me, so I better clean up this mess.” It took me many years to realize this was not my mess and the time I was wasting taking care of it was. It finally dawned on me that learning not to see the mess while paving my evolutionary path is a much better investment of my precious time.

So what are you tolerating? 

Eliminate what you are tolerating step by step, and see what’s waiting for you behind that curve on your path. What’s on the other side of your coin? Start paving your path and engage in actively cultivating your personal evolution.

What are you tolerating, and how can you eliminate it? 

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