What is Flourishing?
By Joy Hoffman
It’s a pretty profound question, really.
One I’ve spent a lot of years asking.
Fortunately, I’m not the first to ask.
We each have a valuable perspective from which we can answer this question, but we also stand on the shoulders of so so many who have come before us and left us with their insights. Plus, we can share perspectives with more of our contemporaries than ever before, leaving us with a more holistic view of the landscape of flourishing than ever before.
No doubt, flourishing is multi-dimensional. There is no single, simple soundbite kind of answer. But, here are some of the most concise definitions we have to offer or pass along:
Flourishing is:
The capacity to enjoy life.
Being fully alive.
The ability to connect meaningfully/lovingly to self, others, & the natural world in the present moment, most of the time.
Wholeness.
“The degree to which someone is able to express & manifest their essence." — Carol Sanford
Freud defined health as: The ability to love and work. (We would just like to add play to that list.)
How have I come to settle on these definitions?
While humans are not born with instruction manuals, given enough time, we have figured out quite a bit about the way we work. In one of the great unassigned group projects of our species, people unbounded by time and place have contributed to our understanding of wellbeing, happiness, and human flourishing.
As a girl growing up in Southern church culture, I internalized this subtle and sometimes not so subtle message that I did/should not have needs, that any needs I had could/should be met by God, and that if I were to have any needs they were just the survival sort of needs. Yes, I felt ok to admit, I needed food, water, and shelter. But when did needs become wants?
I had this murky belief that anything I wanted above sheer survival was just a want that felt kind of frivolous and unnecessary. In fact, I felt kind of bad to have anything above the most basic survival need because I knew there were so many others who didn’t have even those needs met.
But at some point in my 20’s, I experienced a pretty major shift.
I had a daughter (my first child). I thought a lot about what I wanted for her in her life. I realized my main hope for her life was that she would become fully herself and pursue her own dreams, whatever they might be.
I started to stress a bit about how to help her do that. How will I know if I should start her in ballet or soccer or robotics? What school will be best for her? Preschool, no preschool? Public, private, Montessori, homeschool? Etc, etc… As the questions in my mind started to spin out, a question and an answer appeared in my heart at the same time with such compassion:
Her best chance (of being herself and following her dream) is if I model that path for her. (My dad often said, You reproduce who you are not what you say. And how could I even talk to her about following her dreams if I didn’t actually know anything about it myself?)
Why don’t I give myself that same permission/space? How many generations of females do we have to go through to get to a male (who are allowed/encouraged to follow their dreams)? That’s not right! It’s not right for me to sacrifice my dreams “for the sake of my children”—I need to follow my dreams for the sake of my children…but also to honor all the mothers who came before me who sacrificed on my behalf. If this is what I want most for my daughter, isn’t it probably what they truly wanted most for their daughters? This isn’t ending with my daughter. It’s ending with me.
It was a powerful moment for me. But it actually didn’t get me very far. I didn’t know what I wanted for my own life or how to even figure that out. But it became my focus. I felt responsible to the generations before me and after me to figure it out.
I began to ask myself in earnest: What does an ideal day look like to me? What about an ideal week or year? What do I love doing? What am I doing when I lose track of time? What would I do if I could do anything? These kinds of questions.
Through this process, at times, I could start to feel guilty and self-indulgent or that it was too risky to really follow my dreams—maybe I should do something more “responsible” that I know will provide for my family.
During this time, one morning, I woke up from a dream. It was almost gone but it had that feeling of something important, so I tried to pull it back in… I caught just the tail of it: these hands planting this little stick of a tree in this beautiful place. What was that about? Why did it feel so important? Something impressed in me that it was a cherry tree. Ok…what’s that about? My mind flashed back to a line of poetry from Pablo Neruda that I had come across a few days before:
“I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
And in the same way I somehow knew it was a cherry tree being planted in the dream, I suddenly knew that I was the cherry tree in the dream—and that God—the one that made stars and flamingos—was telling me that he/her/whatever was wanting to do with me what spring does with the cherry trees.
It was so powerful. If that’s what God was trying to do with me, who was I to get in the way? Maybe I should just get on board.
But what did it even look like for me to bloom?
I kept asking those questions about what an ideal day looked like for me, but they just began to expand and expand… If I were blooming, would I respond to my kids like this? Would I eat like this? Etc., etc.
This led me to research on human flourishing and learning from as many people from as many perspectives as possible on what it means for people to bloom.
I’ve been asking these questions for about fifteen years now. After about twelve years (maybe?) I tried to synthesize all I’d absorbed into something as concise as possible. The Flourishing Self-Assessment is what emerged.
If you’re like me, and you like digging deeper into these things, I’ve curated a list, a progression really, of videos and podcasts that hit some of the best research and perspectives I’ve encountered in this exploration. It’s by no means exhaustive, but it’s a good place to start if you’re interested.
The bottom line
More importantly, the question is: What does it look like for you to flourish? To bloom? To become fully yourself and pursue your dreams?
That is my highest hope for you, too.
