The Life Support Paradigm
Having kicked self-care to the curb in my last post, today I’m going to expand on just what Life Support is by describing the Life Support Paradigm [1].
So, to review, we’re defining the broad concept of life support as doing the things necessary to live the lives we want to live. This overarching umbrella of an idea has varied implications for all of us.
The broadness of life support flows from the reality that, as humans, our composition includes a whole set of interactive, interdependent systems and we live within environments and communities with interactive and interdependent systems. Trying to map it all out regularly breaks my brain.
Merriam-Webster defines life support as “providing support necessary to sustain life.” The spirit of this definition echoes the “food, air, shelter, water, and heat,” which define the minimum amount of stuff we’d need if we wanted to live off planet. Expanding the definition of life support from sustaining life to living life allows us to shift our perspectives on “food, air, shelter, water, and heat” to encompass more of our lived experience. These expanded elements make up the core of the Life Support Paradigm.
To the core life support elements, we add a linear timeline. This inclusion of time in the paradigm acknowledges that we’re regularly considering, completing, and changing how we support ourselves to create the lives we want to have. Including the timeline helps me remember that I’m doing all of these life support tasks for a reason.
Core Elements of Life Support
Before we dig into life support’s core elements, we must note two things.
First, how nuanced and detailed we can address or influence any of these elements is contextually dependent. In some seasons, we have the time and energy to drill into one or more of the areas, and in other seasons we’re so busy treading water we’re doing well to acknowledge the existence of these elements.
Sometimes our capacity varies from a small set of loops to a much larger set of loops.
Second, the graphic representation of the core elements of life support as being five points along a standing infinity symbol reflects the interconnectedness of these elements (aka the Life Support Loop). So even if our focus for a season narrows into one element, the connection between the elements means we’re influencing more than one thing (aka, multitasking at its finest).
Individual Nourishment
Individual nourishment broadens our basic need for food. Opening the idea of what nourishes us to include all the things we consume in support of the life we want to have. This extension acknowledges that the ideas and experiences we encounter can impact our lived experiences just as much as the food we eat.
Individual nourishment within the Life Support Paradigm considers everything from food and drink, to what we watch and read, to the people and places we encounter. By being as intentional as possible when selecting what we nourish ourselves with, we can, over time, shift how we feel about ourselves, how our bodies feel, and how we react to the world.
Communal Connection
Communal connection applies a conceptual leap to our basic need for air. The leap required is that generally, there is a path of air that connects me to you and to every other thing above water and within earth’s atmosphere. By latching onto air’s quality of facilitating social connections, we stretch air such that it becomes the medium through which we reach to satisfy our human need for connection. This work can look like holding space for the expression of another’s experience or taking up airtime to share ours.
Communal connection within the Life Support Paradigm creates, maintains, disrupts, and cuts the social connections between us and the broader world around us. This life support area challenges many of us because our communal connections with other humans have been intensely harming, fear-inducing, and shame-activating. When experiencing those challenges with humans, sometimes creating relationships between yourself and nature or animals provides the foundational healing spaces we need to support the life we want.
Material Interaction [3]
Material interaction expands the conversation around shelter from the roof over our heads to the physical spaces we inhabit. Located at the crossing point of the upper loop of tangible stuff and the lower loop of less tangible stuff, the physical interaction space of life support includes our interactions with all of real-world, practical stuff.
Material interaction within the Life Support Paradigm starts with our bodies and moves out to the spaces we inhabit and from there to the spaces we encounter. Most of the time, the nature of the physical world limits our ability to toss and replace large pieces of our physical interactions with the world, requiring much of the work we do here to be more in the realm of maintenance and renovation rather than creation and destruction. This applies to our bodies as well as to our homes, workspaces, and other environments.
Energy Calibration
Energy calibration leans heavily on understanding temperature levels as an expression of the amount of activity within an energetic system. While we live within a culture that reveres the idea that more energy is always better, the Life Support Paradigm acknowledges that, as humans, both too little energy (cold) and too much energy (hot) can damage our systems. Given the complexity of human systems, we have multiple energetic systems requiring our awareness. This model focuses on the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energetic systems. As you do we work, our energetic system may expand to include a more nuanced understanding of what fills and drains us individually.
Energy calibration within the Life Support Paradigm seeks to keep our various energy levels within our individual safety zones. To make energy calibration tangible, I consider myself the keeper of a set of interconnected energy reservoirs. For example, I regularly check all the energy pools to see if they’re too low or too high. Then using this real-time information I look at my calendar to create and manage the activities of a given day or so - filling the low-energy pools and using the energy available in other pools, so it doesn’t spill over the side.
Emotional Tide
Emotional tide recognizes that much like water, our emotions are constantly in flux and both our internal conditions and the environmental qualities of the moment determine our experience. In some moments, we’re like calm seas. When the world maintains a low impact level, we move through our days riding small waves. In some moments, we’re like rough seas. When the world keeps tossing pebbles and big rocks at us, we move through our day activated or even triggered, fighting the chaos and trying to see through the ocean spray. And, finally, some days, we’re like the dead seas. When we put up enough walls and bubble wrap that the world can’t really impact us, we find ourselves stuck in the doldrums, just waiting for it all to end.
Emotional tide within the Life Support Paradigm requests that we try to work with our present emotional experiences rather than looking to maintain or change them. You might notice that, unlike the other core life support elements, ‘tide’ is not a word that easily converts to an active verb. I chose it because, in my experience, the work of supporting emotional tides in our lives primarily revolves around allowing them to happen in safe and contextually appropriate ways rather than stuffing or avoiding them in perpetuity.
The five core elements labeled on the Life Support Paradigm icon.
The Timeline
Through that middle node of the standing infinity symbol runs a timeline representing the connection from our lives today to both our earlier experiences and the life we want to have later (even if later is in five minutes). The acknowledgment of time creates the opportunity to recognize that both our history and our desires shape how we want to live today.
Earlier
As humans with a limited understanding of the world we’re born into, our earlier life experiences inform much of who we are and how we interact with the world. Our earlier experiences, particularly our early history, establish our ‘go-to’ stories for understanding our place in the world and often defines our expectations for our behavior and the behavior of those around us. We’ve all lived so much (even if we’ve been stuck in the doldrums) that looking at our history helps us identify our patterns and cycles. A full awareness of our lived experience can create the internal space we need to have self-compassion as we bump and grind along our path toward experiencing more wholeness.
Being able to talk about earlier times confirms that we survived. It might have been messy and by the skin of our teeth. We may have bumps and bruises we need to attend to. And, yet, looking back allows us to know we can do hard things. Maybe, not as gracefully as we’d like, but they get done.
Now
The now point holds the robust promise of the Life Support Paradigm because it contains the point where we can do something to influence our future.
During a casual conversation about what constituted a new millennium (what can I say, we were concerned about Y2k), my brother, Eric Murbach, lobbed the following truth into the conversation, “A new millennium starts every second.” While he doesn’t remember saying it, it’s become a touchstone for me. This is a way for me to know it’s OK to change the path at any time of the day or year because why not? It’s a new millennium.
Now represents where we have access to the agency and capacity necessary to bolster, modify, or influence any part of our lives. Action-taking, whether intentional or conditioned, occurs in the now. The now point and the material interaction element occur concurrently because that point represents both the access point to the life support elements and the action point where we have agency.
When I get stuck in the muck and find myself needing to crawl out again, I start by defining what my life support elements look like. Knowing where we are helps us to determine where we want to go.
Later
Many of us reach for a life somehow different from the one we live today. We may want to throw in the towel and begin again, or maybe we want to find another way to make money, or even have more than cats to come home to. There are so many possibilities for what your life could look later - whether we’re talking months or years from now. We can influence some of what happens later by accessing the agency and capacity in our lives now to start making the changes that get us where we want to go.
For some of us, knowing what we want or even looking forward to later takes courage. For years, I lived for the next two weeks. Other than the Christmas holiday, I didn’t look any further out on my calendar than two and a half weeks. I couldn’t. It was too unknowable and frightening to contemplate anything further away. Either there was more planned than I could possibly do, or worse, looking too far ahead meant I might get excited about something to only have my hopes dashed later.
As you think about later, choose a manageable time frame for yourself. And, if you’re trying to take a big “anything but this swing,” use that to frame the later you define.
The Life Support Paradigm
As a mental model, The Life Support Paradigm stacks the five core life support elements onto a timeline. By linking our history with our future through our actions today, we have access to the information we need to evaluate what works and what doesn’t work as we adjust our life support actions in the now. This combination allows us to try, fail, and try slightly different ways to get to the life we want.
I hope y’all will join me over the next little bit as we delve into the nuance and challenge of this new way of supporting the lives we want to have.
[1] Paradigm is another word for model. I’m using it here because part of me classifies models as something describing physical things that can be constructed, built, or assembled and paradigms as somewhat amorphous maps in my head.
[2] Oxford Languages definitions used herein are provided in the Google response to searching for the discussed term.
[3] 2023-03-05 Paradigm Revision: Changed the language on the elemental loop from physical interaction to material interaction. I talking about the LSP with Deb Jackson, she immediately reframed my label from physical to material. It clicked because the word material suggests a broader classification of stuff that would include physical (which is tied to being in a body in my brain) as a subset.
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