FRIENDS! Don’t you just LOVE when you have a fun new idea that helps you think of life and humans more clearly?

This quadsection idea came to me completely fluidly and wholly about two or three weeks ago, a natural confluence and consequence of everything I have studied and learned in life to date. SO gratifying, I say! And as I share with friends and patients, It’s mostly validated so far. Now I look forward to seeing how it evolves in application and practice hereafter.
OK so:

We can frame life as an intersection of four things:

1. DNA: Our inherited genetic predispositions. We can know much of these tendencies intuitively, and now objectively with advancing genetic testing. This influences possibly everything, but only in rare cases truly determines anything.
2. Personal history: Our lived experience to date, including family of origin, culture, time in history, past traumas, world events in our lifetime, and all of our choices, actions, relationships–everything!
3. The current moment: Environment, circumstances, mindset–down to this second or heartbeat, infinitely dynamic and fluid. This is the confluence of a multitude of factors; wow, it just occurred to me right now that this moment itself could be the multiverse convergence, no? Our perceptions and thus thoughts, feelings, words, and actions are formed in real time, in this moment, and depend, arguably, on the other three things.
4. The innate human need for safety, security, connection, and belonging: In the end, what else do we live for?

What fascinates me about this framework is that we have no control over any but the second of the four–our own lived experience. We create it. And even then, all we have is agency, not actual control. In any given moment, depending on my mindset, physical state, and external circumstances, I have free will and choice, and yet much of my perception, response/reaction/action will be determined in advance by bias, pattern recognition (accurate or not), and automatic reflex before intentional cognition. And all of my past actions were the same–somewhat volitional, much not.

Additionally, each of us brings both totally unique and shared human experience to any given moment. Isn’t it a wonder, then, that we can actually agree on so much, and doesn’t this also explain how our experiences can and should be so wildly divergent?

If we accept this premise/framework, just for a moment, what do we then do with it? On one hand I can imagine responding with a victim mindset–seeing how little I actually control among these four determinants of life, I think of myself as simply an object of my genes, everything that has happened to me in life, and anything that will happen hereafter. I become passive and disengaged. On the other hand, also seeing how little I control, I exert disproportionate energy to achieve that control in those few domains. Personally, I land in the space of acceptance and agency (somewhere along this spectrum, no?): Recognize what I do not and cannot control, where I can act with influence toward my goals, in service of and in integrity with my values, and seek and/or create opportunities to maximize that agency and advance those goals.

Very soon after the framework occurred to me, I felt something akin to relief and elation. It was an epiphany, really. I had found the relationship between these four things–they intersect. So are they best drawn as lines? Vectors? Or could they be better represented by a Venn diagram? No, not Venn, because that would imply that some parts of life do not include one or more of the four aspects… But then again, is that true?

I still like the image/idea of intersection, but we could define the intersecting parts differently–ropes of variable size and thickness? Rope intersecting with light, with sound waves, and then with quantum energy? I imagine the intersection itself as dynamic, existing with an energy of itself, pulling on any of the four aspects more or less heavily in any given situation. We can intuitively imagine that genetics or past trauma may be more or less salient at this moment, in this enviornment, than in another. This ‘intersection’ is always at play, shifting and emerging in real time, influenced by infinite factors that still fall neatly into the four categories (or not?), creating our lives with each breath, each heartbeat, each quantum packet of spacetime. It’s a four dimensional configuration–I have no true understanding of relativity, but something like that image of the flexible spacetime grid fabric with indentations and protrusions comes to mind. Maybe a physicist reading this can confirm and/or refute the applicability of this image to my theory? Like I said, FUN!

So how does this all land on you, dear reader? Does it pique your interest in the slightest? Thank you for reading, as always. I have now documented my nascent idea, and if it grows into anything more interesting or significant, I can look back and see where and when it started.