Unearthing The Great Themes of Your Life
Take a deeper look at most coincidences in your life, and underneath you’ll find rational stepping stones to their occurrence. Call it god, fate or determinism, but life is playing out it more obvious ways than we want to admit.
Last night I revisited one of my journals from 2019. On one of the pages, I’d made a list I’d called my “life themes.” They were the things I’d realized kept popping up, the patterns that continued to play themselves out in my life in positive and negative ways. There were things like meaning, belonging, significance, and adventure, subjects I kept coming back to. Fast forward a few years, and I was still reckoning with the same stuff. This idea became what I now call The Great Themes of Your Life.
While a lot of people share some of these themes, far fewer have the exact same ones as I do. And no one on the planet reckons with them from the same lens as me—through my values, upbringing, life experience, and specific orientation. What I make of these themes is unique to me, and what you make of yours is unique to you. The way I see it, if we were to combine all of humanity’s reckonings together, we might get close to seeing the whole truth.
The point is, your experiences—the people you connect with, the situations you find yourself in, and the obstacles you come up against—are all baked into, and a result of, the great themes of your life. You are an organism playing out an infinite and evolving loop with your environment. So, understanding what your unique themes are, and consciously partnering with them, is one of the most profound things you can do towards your own actualization this lifetime.
The Thing That Moves You
Joseph Campbell talks about this in his essay, “The Self as Hero,” saying this:
“I brought out my book Myths to Live By by collecting together a series of lectures that I had given at Cooper Union over a period of twenty-four years. My notion about myself was that I had grown up during that time, that my ideas had changed, and too, that I had progressed. But when I brought these papers together, they were all saying essentially the same thing—over a span of decades. I found out something about the thing that was moving me. I didn't even have a very clear idea of what it was until I recognised those continuities running through that whole book. Twenty-four years is a pretty good stretch of time; a lot had happened during that period. And there I was babbling on about the same thing. That’s my myth in there.”
The Themes You Reckon With in Death
Sharon Kaufman in her book, The Ageless Self argues that, in order to achieve ego integrity, interpret and evaluate their life experiences, and maintain continuity, older people integrate diverse experiences into what she calls themes.
Using themes to establish a cohesive sense of identity is how a person creates meaning, organizes the past, explains events, and communicates with others. She argues that, by following this process, people dynamically integrate a wide range of experiences, unique situations, structural forces, values, cultural pathways, and knowledge of an entire life span to construct a current and viable identity.
Although themes are highly individualistic and there is no uniform set, she argues there are four to six themes for each life story. They represent conceptions of meaning that emerge over and over in the texts. Examples of the kinds of themes Kaufman found in the life review material include affective ties, financial status, marriage, work, social status, community service, self-reliance, industry, initiative, search for spiritual understanding, discipline, service, acquiescence, self-determination, financial security, religion, disengagement, family, achievement orientation, creativity, need for relationships, and selflessness.
The Subject Matter of a Life’s Work
I often find myself telling people this:
Your life's work is not something that happens upon you, but the organic amalgamation and transmutation of the unique themes, ideas and experiences that made you up as a person and therefore make your life up.
They key is, we don’t wait around to be called into action, we do the deep work necessary to unearth it ourselves. If we don’t, it’s easy to get stuck in the same processes and patterns we’ve been dealing with our whole lives. While we may grow, we don’t reach our full potential or experience the full depths of transformation available to us. To do this, we must consciously and wholeheartedly engage in the process.
It’s Not All Business
The great themes of your life tell you more than just your life's work in a commercial sense—they tell you your life's work in a literal sense. They’re the things you’re supposed to work with and work out this lifetime. They hold the power of your becoming, and when you come into a conscious relationship with them, integrating them fully into your life, you are more likely to collaborate productively with them, rather than be strung along by them in ways that can sometimes throw you off the path.
3 Practices to Get You Started
Here are some things you can do to determine the Great Themes of Your Life:
Look back at your journals. What have you struggled with? What’s true then that’s also true now?
Observe your dreams and your conscious choices, and see which images and stories continue to pop up
Notice what you chronically complain about, or fight about in relationships, both intimate and not. What might this tell you about what you’re trying to work out in life?
Notice what news items and current events grab your attention the most. Why are you drawn to certain stories over others? What does this say about the events and emotions that you resonate most strongly with?