“Life History Strategies” refers to the ways that living creatures make the most of themselves while having to go through stages of growing, surviving, living and dying. Any one life is unique, but its history is constrained by an inescapable reality of needs, processes and transitions. As individuals, it’s easy to feel that life history happens to us, but it’s just as plausible to think of life history as a thing that individuals make and do for themselves in their worlds. I imagine, create and write to maintain an active relationship with my own life history.
Facing increasing disabilities as I became an adult, I adopted an intentional (also costly, privileged and lucky) approach to my life, narrowing my goals down to, 1) getting and staying healthy and, 2) being held in a community supportive of those efforts. A decade went by and life history happened to me, a bunch. A conceptual/creative/intellectual/domestic hairball got caught up around my intention, becoming inappropriately large to keep inside any one body, and this website is an attempt to yark it into the light. Somewhere in the goopy mess is a cohesive structure that says something meaningful about how I human and, maybe, how other people do too.
I know that within this structure, human cognition and variation is a catalyst for generating a nearly limitless variety of strategies to adopt and adapt, letting individuals optimize the outcomes of their own life histories and improve their quality of life. By accepting and planning for the changes imposed on us by life history, we tap into the power of self-creation to the benefit of all the selves around us, now and in the future. The more people embrace a rich variety of life history strategies, the more likely more people are to generate the essential parts of complex, adaptive solutions for the environmental and societal problems facing our world.
This site is a repository of my own eccentricities and a statement of the hope I get from knowing that every human out there is like me and, therefore, totally unique.
From this perspective of empowerment and hope, I also like to help other people develop explicit and intentional strategies for their own life histories. It is work to find one’s own optimum balance between a current perspective, which meets immediate needs, and the combination of forward-thinking and knowledge of self that makes it possible to anticipate and adjust to life history as it happens. I especially like helping people identify individually meaningful, yet culturally recognizable sets of values to connect the self that is to the self they hope to create. This is my vocation, the special skill that I have and give over to beliefs and projects larger than myself.
