Deeper Meaning of LifeI had a really inspiring call today. It was from a guy called Evan who was 17 years old.  I love that.  17 years old and wanting to understand what life is all about on a much deeper level.

It reminded me a lot of the way I used to be.

When I was 17 I was always searching for an answer. Always wanting to know what life was all about. I used to sit around with my high school friends and whilst I enjoyed their company, I always preferred the company of older people.  I figured the older people had the answer, the answer that I was searching for.  I didn’t know what it was.  Sometimes I thought it was just trying to meet a girl. Trying to get laid.  Trying to be more popular.

After talking to Evan and looking back at my life, I realized it was all about trying to figure out who I am.

See, the beauty of life is that we’re always constantly trying to figure out who we are, and self-development is a never-ending journey of beauty and growth.

Evan asked me on the phone today, “What about when I lose, or I have a loss?”

I said to him, “In life there is no loss. You don’t lose anything, you just learn from it.”

I don’t care if you’re with somebody for two years and then the relationship ends.  You didn’t lose the relationship or the person.  Your time together on this planet was over.

When you lose something you can’t look at it from a negative point of view.

You need to look at it as a positive. You need to look at it and say:

“In the time I was with this person, whether it was a date, a week, a month, a year, or 10 years.  What did I gain and how did I grow?”

You could go even deeper and say, “What lessons did this person present to me?  How am I a better person from this experience?”

And then you need to go even deeper and say:

“How can I thank this person for being in my life?”

And you need to actually go and thank them. Lose the anger, lose the pain, and ditch the feeling of loss.

In life we’re all learning all the time.  We spend our days going from one lesson to the next.

You need to pay attention to the lessons life offers you, rather than whether you “won” or “lost” in a situation. Think about every interaction you have each day and look to see if there’s a lesson in it. It could be someone you ran into in a shop, or someone you sat next to on the bus.

Did you learn anything from your interaction?

It always reminds me of something that happened to me a few years back…

I met a woman in a supermarket one night.  Our chemistry was off the charts. We spent three days together. We didn’t have sex.  We just hung out for three straight days.  That lesson I learned from her was one of the most beautiful lessons in my life.  It was about being present and connecting.  She couldn’t sleep with me.  She had a lot of things going on in her life at the time.  I would have loved to have hung with her, and she would have loved to have hung with me.

We talked about it.  The timing was wrong.  So instead, we looked at our three days together and looked at the wins and the way that we way we grew. We didn’t look at our meeting as a loss. And we didn’t waste time feeling like we could have had a relationship. We could have had more.

It’s all about how you look at things.  

And it’s not about thinking positive all the time. It’s just about looking for the lessons in life.  If you spend your life worrying about whether you’ve won or lost, you miss out on the things that really matter.