What other five lives would you like to live, if you could?
What your life is for — what it's organized around — gives ordinary days weight, generates energy where there'd otherwise be depletion, and makes hard choices easier. Most people never sit down and name theirs.
"Is this how I want to spend my one life?" is the question that starts the work. But it's hard to answer head-on. We rationalize what we've already chosen, or we reach for what our culture, our family, our friends, or our religion tells us to want.
This exercise comes at it sideways.
The part of you that knows what you actually want is usually drowned out by the part defending what you've already chosen. Five Lives gives the quieter voice a way to be heard.
Imagine five lives you could live. Not career options. Not realistic plans. Five lives — parallel, fully formed, each as real as the one you're in now. Pick five you'd genuinely be drawn to, given a clean slate.
They don't have to be possible.
They don't have to make sense together.
They don't have to be impressive.
When you've named all five, you'll get a short letter back to yourself, written from the pattern across them. The five aren't the answer. The pattern is.