The circle of relationships

Yesterday I was thinking about all the people in my life that I regularly see and also the ones that I don’t see that regularly but who are still important to me. Suddenly I had a circle in my mind. I made a little drawing for you:

Imagine you are somewhere inside the circle and everyone else is somewhere on the border line. You can also imagine any other figure for this. This was just my spontanious perception.

The clue about this concept is that it is not possible to stand exactly in the middle of the circle which means it is not possible to have one and the same relationship to many people at the same time. You are always closer to some people than to others. Related to my drawing this means that it is impossible to stand in the middle of the circle. You have to decide for another spot.

What I like about the circle is that it makes it visible that if you move closer to one person you automatically move farther away from another person. Is this a bad thing you may ask? No, of course not. It just means that you have to decide for your own where you wanna stand. I’ve talked about priorities before in another blog post (Define your priorities), maybe you wanna look into that as well.

The reason why I thought about this concept is because there has been a lot of change in my life within the past years. I got married, some friends became closer, some disappeared, … also when I think about my family a lot of things have changed.

We all have limited time and energy. So it is important to decide where we wanna invest it. Instead of trying to stand in the middle of the circle I advise you to decide for a few people that really mean something for you. It doesn’t mean that you should give up your other friendships, of course not. But spending some fun time and really investing in people are two different things. So take a deep look inside yourself and find out where you wanna stand in your own circle of relationships.