Thinking in Six Directions
Yet Another Life Perspective
Here’s a way of looking at life that I’ve wanted to write about for quite a while. If you envision your life as a long walk on a path (perhaps with a friend or two), six directions provide you with orientation: forward along the path before you, backward from whence you came, upward from the ground beneath your feet, downward from the sky above you, inward from the people at your side, and outward from yourself into the world. Exploring the metaphors, I think of these six directions in the following ways:
The forward direction is all about your aims, goals, hopes, and dreams for the future. These can extend beyond your own life to that of your children and descendants, the influence you might have on the course of humanity (howsoever slight), etc.
The backward direction encompasses your life history, your childhood, your family, your ancestry, and really the whole history of humanity before you were born.
The direction upward from the earth beneath you does justice to physicality, earthiness, your animal nature and innate drives, biology, the forces of evolution, the chthonic gods, etc.
The direction downward from the sky above you embraces your ideals, philosophy, religion, the sky gods, etc.
The direction inward from the people around you takes in sociality, love, friendship, brotherhood, community, the formative and sometimes deformative influences upon you of living in human society, and so on.
The direction from your personhood outward is bound up with everything that shines forth from your soul and everything that you place out into the world: the love you give in all its many forms, your creativity, the thoughts you share, and so on.
Although I find this schema to be helpful in my own thinking about life, I haven’t put much effort into defining the directions with precision because I’m not sure how valuable such an exercise would be, and in any case the directions strike me as more suggestive than definitive. As always, your mileage may vary...
Sontag said: “Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them."
Very creativity and useful. How much mileage we get also depends on how we drive.
I like this, and keep thinking of perfect solids and wondering if 8 might work somehow? That would lead to a fascinating geometrical way of creating a space for navigating ideas. Something called Genesa, invented by Jim Shroads. However, I don't want 6 to feel insulted. It's a very fine number :-)