Wellbeing: Did I Say Pizza? I Meant Lava Lamp.
Static, one dimensional, evenly distributed wedges — crammed into a flawlessly circular vessel — don't resonate with our experience of wellness
Wellness (or wellbeing, if you will) is usually illustrated as a perfect circle divided into uniform wedges. Gallup's 5 wedges, for example, represent Social, Financial, Physical, Community, and Career Purpose wellbeing. National Wellness Institute has its Occupational, Physical, Social, Intellectual, Spiritual, and Emotional dimensions.
There's no end to how circles can be sliced up into the elements of wellness, whether there are 6, 7, 8 wedges, or — even as some models have it — 12 wedges of an inner circle surrounded by 8 pastel sections that join to form 2 concentric circles. (Stop this ride, I'm getting dizzy!)
These wellness merry-go-rounds are mostly the product of an American spin on wellness. Elsewhere, especially Europe, the focus is on what wellness is — something related to happiness and life satisfaction. You know... wellbeing! In the US we obsess over the components of wellness — no time to fret about what they add up to — as you may recall from my post "Wellbeing and Pizza: In Search of the Secret Sauce."
These tidy geometrics are a swell way to say that wellbeing goes beyond physical health. But a handful of static, one dimensional, and evenly distributed wedges — crammed into a flawlessly circular vessel — don't resonate with my experience of wellness. And I wonder if they're an ideal way to describe what other people's wellbeing — ultimately their lives — are or can be.
Meet My Globules
My wellness is more like a lava lamp: An ever-changing bunch of free-floating globules of different shapes and sizes. I've got fitness globules, mental health globules, spiritual globules. Some rise to the surface for as others submerge. They're fluid. They expand and they contract.
Some globules, like my health globule and my financial globule, merge for a while. My emotional globule occasionally smothers my intellectual globule; other times, it's the other way around. Look: My creativity globule and logic globule are going at each other right now!
But even the lava lamp analogy eventually runs dry. Ultimately, I want my globules to be set free, to be unbound by time and space, and to interconnect with others' globules — those of people who love me and those of people who don't. Any model of real wellbeing has to show our globules interacting and interconnecting. You heard me right: We must have global globules.
The change starts within. To paraphrase an ancient sage: Be a lava lamp unto thyself.
Copyright 2020 by Bob Merberg. All rights reserved. (My globules may be your globules. But my work is not.)