What Are the Big Questions?
By Mira Jean Steinbrecher, AIA

Editor's note: The author is a licensed architect and a journeyer. She has a lifetime of experience living in communities that she’s valued and a portfolio of work designing homes that serve their occupants in the most loving ways. Mira attended Second Journey’s Northwestern Visioning Council where these questions bubbled up. For further information, visit her website at www.JeanSteinbrecher.com.

As we each make our journey, watching the years on “the odometer of life” tick by, questions arise about how and where we choose to live. As community and support become more important, we begin to ask:

1. How do we live with “a genteel sufficiency”?

2. How much is enough?

3. What are the boundaries between privacy and community?

4. How are these established, enforced, altered, and maintained?

5. How do we share our “stuff”?

6. How do we maintain independence without isolating ourselves?

7. How do we create and maintain interdependence without losing ourselves?

8. What are the obstacles that make life more challenging as our bodies age?

9. How do we design and build in flexibility to accommodate those?

10. What are the mechanisms that keep a community diverse?

11. How can new and creative solutions be woven into the fabric of existing neighborhoods and communities?

12. How do we model all this for our children’s children?

Take these questions for what they’re worth to you. Ponder them as and when you can. Bring them to your book club, your budding community, your circle of caring, your Thanksgiving dinner table. Use them to frame “the rest of your life”!