Forms and Contents of a Lifetime
A Human-Direction Specification Map
These specification maps give a concise depiction of specific features of human direction, without any attempt at narrative or explanation beyond the definitions provided.
Map version: March 22, 2022
Timothy Corwen :: Human-Direction Mapmaker :: tcorwen@humandirectionmap.com
The Forms a Lifetime May Take
A lifetime can take a variety of forms depending on circumstances and your own preferences, talents, and actions. Some people see their lifetime take shape as one really big accomplishment that defines everything they did before that and everything that has come since, as in the case, perhaps, of someone who wins a gold metal at the Olympics. Some forms, like transcendence based on a mystical life, are vary rare. Others are extremely common.
- In the moment: a lifetime focused on the present and finding value, fulfillment, and satisfaction in each moment
- Good days: a lifetime lived day by day, finding value, fulfillment, and satisfaction in each good day
- Steady course: based on reaching a level of position, status, and/or responsibility, and sustaining it
- Pinnacle: one high point in one's life defines its value, fulfillment, and satisfaction, based on opportunities and actions before, status after
- Pinnacle range: a series of high points that define the value, fulfillment, and satisfaction in one's life)
- Peaks and troughs: a lifetime of rising and falling value, fulfillment, and satisfaction (see my own life of repeated fractures as described in “About the Author and the Endeavor”)
- Generative: creating things so that the value of one's life extends beyond its end, such as a family or a work of art
- Transcendent: outside time or extending into eternal, based on a life of spirituality.
Contents Which May Fill a Lifetime
As well as the different forms a lifetime may take, it may also be filled with different contents. Sometimes these are combined in conventional ways (e.g., a steady-course lifetime filled with family, friends, and presentation of self in a successful career). Other combinations may be less conventional (e.g., a pinnacle-range lifetime filled with high points of spiritual experience).
- Needs and comfort, of self and dependents: one's whole life has been devoted simply to providing for oneself and one's family (which may have taken a peaks-and-troughs form or been characterized by a steady course)
- Surrounding order and accumulation: hygiene, acquisition, and tidiness in oneself, one's possessions, and one's surroundings
- Lovers and family: intimacy, care, and reproduction with one or more others
- Social circle of friends, colleagues, and fellow members of a tribe or other group
- Presentation of self or one's manifestations: appearing before others and gaining their approval
- Deep creativity: mapping out a new domain of experience, creating new ideas and perhaps works of art
- Production: producing a large quantity of works or services, either in an ordinary way or based on surface creativity
- Spirituality: union with a divinity.
Further Circuiting to Related Topics on This Website and Elsewhere
My own lifetime to date has taken the peaks-and-troughs form, because of the many fractures (self-imposed or due to circumstances) I have experienced. The content of my life has been deep creativity, without much presentation or even, as yet, much production of works. For a more detailed account see “About the Author and the Endeavor.”
For more readings in HDM, see the extensive introduction to the different layers of worth in a person and how to advance those in concert in my book The Worth of a Person; while for the question of what is needed for individuals and groups to adopt and maintain environmentally sustainable ways of life, see The Environment-Sustaining Person.
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© 2022 by Timothy Corwen.
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