Domains in Life

     I am trying to figure out what the main domains for my life are.  What do I look forward to?  Where do I spend my time?  What's important to me?  I've boiled it down to four things:  Self, Others, Future, Reality.  It seems that most of my thought processes run through these areas.  I'll discuss these themes and how I got to each of them.

     I tried listing in my head the main things that I think about during the day.  I t went a little something like this:  Exercise, Relationships, Study, and Work.  I tried to make them a little more general so that they might be applied to other situations.  Exercise = Self, Relationships = Others, Study = Future, Work = Reality.

     The first domain is all about the self.  What makes us feel better?  How do we seek to improve ourselves?  For me, I think that food and exercise are chief factors in the self.  These make me feel good and help me strive for self-betterment.  Self is about the body and of the mind, but only insofar as personal understanding in improvement are concerned.

     The second is Others.  Others includes interactions, thoughts, and feelings with, about, and toward any other person.  These relationships could be romantic or plutonic.  Main questions here are:  Who do I want to talk to?  To whom do I look up?  Whose opinion or advice do I value?

     Future is a very large factor in this thought process.  My original thought was study.  I don't really mean planning for the future in this way, but rather more like, "What do I leave the future for having been here?"  I guess Future, in this sense, is more allied to people rather than events.  For me, my course of study is something that I would like to become somewhat of an expert in so that I can eventually  make a small, yet important, contribution.  How do I leave my mark?  How will people know I existed?

     The last factor is Reality.  I had to add work in some way into this mix, but I didn't originally know how.  I think that Reality could be re-named Society or some such.  While the other three factors are mostly intrinsic, Reality is very extrinsic.  I think that Reality has more to do with future planning, possibly, as well as money-making, politics, etc.

     I understand that spirituality is nowhere in this "model."  I did that on purpose to an extent because this has no place among my four.  Perhaps I could see this model almost as a foundation or definition for spirituality, but I will not include it inside.  

     Perhaps a therapist could use this to go into deeper insight into a client.  I think that all clients, to some degree or another, can express their own understandings of life so far through a pattern of thought like this.