Life Mapping 1

In case you haven’t noticed (if there is still anyone still reading this, haha) this blog has shifted in focus pretty dramatically since it started in 2004. Back then, I wrote pieces on a lot of different things… some religious in nature… some hobbies and passions of mine… family updates… those types of things. It was a mish-mash for sure.

I feel like it’s shifted recently to almost an on-line journal. This is less what I should write that will entertain the people reading… and more about writing publically concerning the things that are going on inside of me. And over the past year and a half… I feel like there has been a deep heart transition taking place within me. It’s really quite difficult to explain. And because this is so… I really haven’t communicated it with a lot of people. I look at this blog as a bit of an outlet, I guess. I really haven’t disclosed much here in regard to what this transition is… mostly because I still feel that I’m in the midst of it… but it’s a good place to write and put down into words what I’m feeling, wrestling with and thinking about. Anyway, here’s another personal evaluation post: Take from it what you can

I recently had a breakfast meeting with a man who I’ve asked to mentor me. It’s been a joy to connect with him. He has a wealth of information to pass along in terms of psychology and learning to process certain types of life management type things. He showed me a model that he had picked up in his own journey. It was a funnel… with a wide top at the beginning which represented childhood, teen years and the 20’s. It symbolized how wide open the possibilities are in that phase of life… lots of choices and directions and things you could invest your life in. The funnel narrowed dramatically… and he said this represented the 30’s. It’s there where, traditionally, you’ve identified what career path you are firmly in… and in fact… this is the time where you really understand how you fit specifically within your own field.

The graph moves on to show a line in the funnel… which represents the 40’s and how there are times when our choices in our late 20’s and early 30’s end up not going quite the way we’d like it to go and so we need to refocus… or maybe we are in the field we are supposed to be in… but we’ve experienced some mission drift and need to figure out a way to leverage our gifts so that we are making the most of the time we have left working in this field.

The graph widens again at 60… I can’t remember what he said about this exactly… but it seems like this represents retirement from your chosen field… and a time when you could involve yourself in just about anything you want again… the possibilities widen to a certain point in retirement when you aren’t constrained by time of your full time occupation.

It was interesting to see it illustrated like it was… and obviously there are many exceptions to the rule… but I thought I’d throw this out into cyberspace as a two part post. The first is this one. My next one will be much more personal in how I see myself fitting into the various points of the graph. Be back soon.