Buckets of experience
You are born with an experience bucket. It's with you from your very first breath.
From that first moment, you start filling it with experiences—the first sounds you hear, your first touch, the things you see and taste. Each tiny grain of experience fills your experience bucket, otherwise known as your life.
But the one thing that you don't know is that your experience bucket has a hole in the bottom. As a child, you don't really notice the hole. Every day is full of experiences, big and small, and they are constantly filling your bucket, so you don’t hear the sound of the experiences draining away.
But after a while, as you become a teenager, you start to realize that it's harder to keep filling the bucket; you begin to forget things, and you have to start working at filling the bucket. Throughout your childhood, you might also notice that not all experiences are the same. Watching TV or scrolling through social media or webpages are very small grains of experience; they don’t stay with you, they slip right out of your bucket.
Reading books, starting a friendship, writing, and drawing seem to be more substantial pebbles of experience that don't drain away so easily. The more effort you put into something, the longer it seems to hang around, but if you stop practicing, eventually, even these pebbles will disappear down the hole in your experience bucket.
You also start to realize that if your bucket feels full, then life seems better. You might even be able to share some of the pebbles of experience with other people, and in return, they share some of their pebbles to fill your bucket even further.
On the flip side, when you feel like your bucket is getting more and more empty, life seems smaller and less fulfilling. Trying to fill your experience bucket can start to seem harder and harder, so you might just stop trying.
Luckily, some people have help filling their buckets; your parents, friends, and even a like-minded stranger can help. But that is not true of everyone. Sometimes, people empty your bucket.
You can always fill the bucket by practicing a skill, but often, your practice is in a single dimension, and you repeat things you have done in the past. This temporarily fills your bucket with small grains of experience, but that never lasts.
So what do you do? I would say that you need to think of building experiences that are multi-dimensional. In other words, one-dimensional practice leads to very small grains of experience, but multidimensional experiences lead to much larger pebbles (or even rocks) of experience, which, in some cases, will never fall out of the hole in the bottom of your experience bucket.
So, how do you create multi-dimensional experiences?
The first step is, in fact, that one-dimensional experience of practice, but the second step is to create a tool for yourself — a meeting agenda template or a plan for getting fit. Creating your own tool helps build a more robust experience in two dimensions.
Yet, to really make something substantial, it needs to be three-dimensional. You need to share your tools and your experience with others to form a connection to build understanding. This can take the form of making something, books, movies, videos, poems, blog posts, music groups, drawings, anything that allows other people to take part in your experience. These three-dimensional experiences — these bigger pebbles and rocks — don’t so easily slip through the hole in your bucket, and if lots of people start to connect with your three-dimensional experience, then they can form movements and organizations that last the test of time.
Filling your experience bucket is the work of a lifetime, and keeping it full can determine how much you enjoy that life. It's a never-ending process with no endpoint. The more multi-dimensional experiences you create, the less you need to fill your bucket with repetitive experiences like watching TV or scrolling through your Instagram feed, experiences that just slip through the hole in your experience bucket like so many grains of sand.
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