For the last few months, all over the world, disruptive events have been taking place.  Some may go as far as saying, degenerative too.   While my summer has certainly been disrupted and disruptive on many levels, I refuse to buy into an assumption that it is necessarily degenerative.  

What if we took a different view of the unfolding disruptive global and personal events that have been opening fissures between family, friends and countries?   What if we saw them as necessary nudges to move away from the immediate emotion and get a fresh perspective?  When we consciously move away from our ingrained opinions and two-dimensional and conditioned judgment of situations, we begin to recognise that these events might be necessary as we become aware of a new phase of developing and evolving opening up.

The disruptive events that require us to wake up and notice our own evolution are often challenging, painful and can appear apparently out of our own control.  Someone close to us suffers, and we may feel like a bystander as we watch their reality unfold.  However, if we can see it, then it is our reality too.  So, we are not helpless bystanders, we do have control.   

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When things ‘go wrong’ in our lives, it feels to me as if there is a conditioned social response which we feel obliged to engage with and get swept up in.  We forget that we can choose our response.  Just because other people may behave in a certain way, doesn’t mean that it is right for us as an individual to do the same.  With all the disruption out there at the moment, take a breath and choose your response.  It can be quite liberating to choose to do things differently. Be positively disruptive in return and choose your own outcome.

In my sometimes haphazardly managed, Tigger-like enthusiasm, I can forget that everyone’s evolution is their own, though.  If we are not evolving, then we are either stagnating or going backwards.  And it may not necessarily happen for them.  Above all, no-one can make anyone else evolve and grow, but it all starts with awareness, an awareness of the possibility of change, a new paradigm, something better.

If my own experience of growth is anything to go by, it has not been like a flower pushing steadily upwards, drawn by an invisible force and blossoming into a beautiful and elegant thing to behold. I wish! True, there have been times of effortless gliding upwards in steady and pleasing curves, but also stagnation, crashes of momentum, and then a dive as another evolutionary challenge arrives on the scene like a hurricane coming out of the Gulf of Mexico.

Often what instigates another period of growth and evolving is something very mundane which then becomes a metaphor for the necessary change of perspective.  

Having been experiencing stagnation as well as the metaphorical hurricane coming out of Gulf of Mexico, unusually for me, I felt impelled to clean the windows!  All of the new ideas and insights began to flow in while I was brandishing the broom around window frames outside.  Swiping away at the cobwebs in corners while sweeping out the cobwebs that had surreptitiously accumulated in my mind.  Refocusing and correcting the myopia in my short-sightedness allowed me to see the events from a different perspective.   I could see clearly again.

The second metaphor became the repotting of the money trees.  What took me so long? How is growth possible if we are bound and constricted?  We all need mental, physical and emotional space to grow and evolve.

So, while it was useful on a practical level to get the window panes squeaky clean and to repot the money trees, the time it gave me to reflect and the insights I got has lifted the myopia and brought back a sense of expansion.

By grounding and re-evaluating the disruptive events of recent weeks in metaphors, I have been able to make some sort of sense out of it all, as well as making way for the next phase of evolution.