7 Dimensions of a Life Well Lived

 When someone asks "What do you really want?" the answer tends to come up in pieces: we think about what we want in one part of our life. It's hard to think about all the parts of our lives at the same time. Yet everything we do in one relationship or project or place affects who we are and how we show up in all the others. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. You hold one perfect piece in your hand but it only works if you can find out how it fits with all the others.

Photo by Lynne Bookey on Scopio

We cannot see the whole puzzle of our own lives. It's more than our conscious minds can handle and it's always changing. We are only comfortable thinking in 4 dimensions (height, width, depth and time). But if we use our extended mind (we journal, we connect with others, we create physical spaces as memory aids) we could stretch to 7. And with 7 dimensions, we can begin to see how the pieces come together to form a life well-lived.

There might, of course, be more than 7. But 7 is "the magic number" identified as the most we are likely to be able to hold in memory at once. And the dimensions I am going to suggest are  necessary in a life well lived are these: place, agency, connection, purpose, mastery, health and exploration. We can group them as three that are primarily about living in your own skin and four that are primarily about connecting with the world around you.

The three that are mostly about you are agency, mastery and health. Having a you depends on managing the physical self in good ways, so most people can see that health matters. Agency and mastery are two sides of the same coin: we want to know what we can actually do, and we like to do things reliably and yet still improve, still get better at what we do. If we can hold onto a sense that we have the ability to take action and the capability to do it well, we feel better about ourselves.

The four that are primarily about connecting to the world are place, purpose, connection and exploration. All of these acknowledge that life happens somewhere and the way we understand and feel about our circumstances is largely what we try to influence through our goals and actions. For some people, place, purpose and connection are very large and abstract: they include spiritual realities beyond the physical universe. For others, the same dimensions are limited to the physical world. For all people, what we know about our circumstances is limited and we feel a push to know more. That's exploration, whether we do it to feel more secure or to find adventure.

Over the next few months, I'll be exploring different aspects of these 7 dimensions. We will think together about what they might contain and how they might shape our experience. We will also think about how to make this thinking practical: to change what we do so that we translate more awareness into more action into more satisfaction.

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