What I Learned from Drawing a Circle
Love. Kindness. Respect. Adventure. Curiosity. Humor.
Words by
John Maitland
Published on
Oct 11, 2025
One evening in 2018, late at night, awoken by stress of the incoming day, I grabbed a pencil and drew a circle to cope with the late night brain race I had started for the impending workday that followed. Then another circle overlapping the original, and another, until it looked like bubbles filling an empty sky. I started writing words in the center and their overlapping areas. Shelter. Safety. Comfort. Nutrition. Security. The essentials. The things that keep a person alive.
It was a way to locating myself — not in the world exactly, but in my own life. I was trying to understand why I could feel full one week and hollow the next, why purpose seemed to slip through my hands whenever I reached for it.
At the time, I wasn’t trying to make anything profound or a piece of art. I just wanted to understand myself a little better and map out the shape of my patterns. I’d been reading about attachment styles, love languages, all the usual attempts at self-awareness. But every model I found felt too linear, prescriptive, like I was supposed to climb my way toward enlightenment. I didn’t want a ladder. I wanted a landscape.
When I finished, I didn’t have a plan or a framework. I just had a map of being — something to hold up against myself when I started to drift like I was that night.
The Body as a Compass
Over the years, almost without thinking, I’ve added more: growth, love, autonomy, belonging, compassion. And still more: grace, integrity, creativity, joy. The words began to arrange themselves into families. Body, mind, heart, spirit. Order and chaos. Independence and connection. It wasn’t perfect or pretty, but it felt true. Like I’d drawn a mirror.
Over time the the bubbles became a hub and spoke model, representing a wheel. It became a wheel of what I was already chasing: to live in rhythm with the natural world, to spend my time intentionally, to keep an open mind toward others, to love and accept myself, to live in balance.
Those lines — written years apart in notebooks, typed into lists, taped to a wall — became a quiet gravity. They’re not ambitions as much as bearings. They point me toward the kind of life that feels worth living.
Those are the values I return to. The ones that form the spine of everything else. I can almost feel myself turning through it like the seasons.
Winter, for instance, is when I live closer to the center. Shelter. Warmth. Consistency. I eat well, read more, focus on stability. It’s a time for the quieter values: dependability, humility, reflection. Spring pulls me outward. I start thinking about growth, about taking risks again. I rediscover curiosity. I walk more, talk more, reconnect. My attention loosens. I give myself permission to change. Summer is the season of belonging. I’m out in the world, surrounded by friends and family, working, sweating, laughing. There’s generosity in the air. Hope. Romance. The reminder that joy counts as a form of responsibility too. By fall, I’m often circling the outer edge of the wheel, where legacy and contribution live. I start thinking about what I’ve built and what will outlast me. I ask if I’ve been kind enough. If I’ve given enough. If I’ve learned to forgive, to listen, to love without expectation.
And then, inevitably, I return to the middle again. Shelter. Safety. Comfort. The center always waits.
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When I first made the wheel, I thought it was something to be studied. But I’ve learned it has to be lived.
That lesson came mostly through movement. Cycling, backpacking, endurance runs — the long, quiet hours where thought becomes rhythm and the body does the thinking for you. Somewhere out there, miles from anything, the pattern of the wheel starts to make sense. Breath in, breath out. Effort and ease. Hunger and relief. Each turn of the pedals its own meditation on survival, strength, humility, and awe.
I’ve found the same peace working with my hands. Fixing a broken door, building compost bins, cooking dinner, planting something in the ground. Labor is nothing if not honest. It puts you back into the same conversation as your ancestors: work, rest, repeat. In that rhythm, the wheel becomes less of an idea and more of a pulse.
Working with my hands keeps me grounded in what’s real. It reminds me that purpose isn’t discovered through abstraction — it’s made visible through contact. Through the sweat and the ache, the weight of tools, the warmth of food, and bleeding a little bit because the gloves you intended to wear are left on the banister and you’re a little too lazy to go back inside and get them.
The Balances
The wheel has taught me that balance is never permanent. It’s a conversation between opposites that never really ends.
I’ve had to learn how to live between objectivity and subjectivity — to see clearly without losing feeling, to feel deeply without losing clarity. Objectivity gives me order, reason, the patience to look at what is. Subjectivity gives me art, empathy, meaning, the permission to see what could be. One without the other becomes brittle. Together they create movement.
The same balance plays out between personal freedom and social responsibility. Too much freedom, and the world becomes selfish and cruel. Too much obedience, and it loses its identity. The best of humanity survives in the space between — where individuality enriches community, and community gives shape to individuality. I suppose that’s what the wheel keeps reminding me: everything has its counterweight. Every virtue has an echo.
The wheel turns through those polarities constantly. Order and chaos. Stability and adventure. Mind and body. Work and rest. It never chooses one over the other. It simply turns.
Nature has always been my truest teacher. It doesn’t moralize or demand, it just exists in quiet reverence. The forest, the ocean, a field in late afternoon light — they each tell the same story of balance. Growth and decay. Stillness and movement. Nothing forced, nothing wasted.
When I’m on a bike far from the noise, somewhere between towns, the hum of the tires against a gravel road becomes its own prayer. Mountains and rivers shrink the ego down to size. The world keeps breathing whether I’m watching or not, and that’s comforting. To live fully, I think, is to live in reverence with what you can’t control.
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Some days I catch myself in the survival zones again: security, stability, routine. I pay bills, clean the dishes, make dinner, check the locks. I used to think those parts of life were the least meaningful, but they provide me with a lot of meaning. Purpose doesn’t always announce itself through passion. Sometimes it hums through the mundane, through repetition, through the quiet act of caring for what you already have.
Other days I orbit farther out, into the realm of meaning-making. I ask bigger questions. What does contribution look like? How do you build legacy without ego? How do you measure generosity when no one’s watching?
And then there are the in-between days, where I float somewhere near humor or pleasure or curiosity. Days that don’t teach me anything profound but remind me that joy and amusement matter too.
Some days I live close to the center focused on shelter, health, security, the tangible work of keeping life in order. Other days I spin outward toward expression, curiosity, aesthetics, liberty, adventure. Most days, I move back and forth without noticing. The wheel doesn’t ask for perfection; it simply asks for participation.
The qualities that live there: compassion, observation, humor, humility, faith, service, mastery, love — they’re not milestones. They’re companions. They’re what remind me that purpose isn’t found in achievement but in relation: between the mind and body, between myself and others, between what I have and what I give.
Every quality on the wheel feels like a doorway into the same home. Some days I walk in through diligence, other days through wonder. Sometimes through exhaustion. Sometimes through joy. But the house is always there.
Each part of the wheel has its own temperature. You can feel when you’ve lingered too long in one place.
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The territory of creativity has always felt like home and has certainly shaped who I have become. I can get lost there for hours building ideas and moulding them like clay. It’s where I rediscover play and awe. I think of it as the air pocket that keeps everything else from getting too heavy.
Faith, on the other hand, has always been a quieter part of the circle for me. I don’t mean religion exactly, but that sense of trust in the unseen order of things. I struggle to stay there. But every time I make it back, it feels like a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.
And then there’s compassion—the one that never stops teaching me. Compassion for others comes easily enough. Compassion for myself is a lifelong project.
I often think about the world we’re building, and how fragile it has become because we mistake cruelty for strength. Somewhere along the line, greed was rebranded as ambition, and obedience started calling itself law and order. Violence dresses itself up in nationalistic flags. Authority forgot it works for the people, not the other way around. The wheel reminds me that any system built on domination is already breaking under its own weight.
I don’t believe in scarcity when it comes to care. Kindness is infinite. Empathy doesn’t run out. People choose to be cruel the same way they choose to look away, and I’ve stopped pretending it’s anything more complicated than that.
I reject the kind of greed that eats through communities and calls it progress. I reject leaders who trade fear for power and pretend it’s safety. The world doesn’t need more control; it needs more connection.
Decency isn’t naïve. Compassion scales. Community and progress aren’t limited resources; they’re renewable ones. The wheel keeps turning because we keep turning it together, and every small act of care is another push forward.
I believe our collective purpose is bound to the same rhythm as the personal one: to live in balance with nature, to care for each other, to leave the place better than we found it. That’s the work of being alive.
The Return
The wheel, at its best, is a practice in remembering. Every word on it is something I’ve been, or failed to be, or hope to be again.
Sometimes I think about what’s missing from it. I never wrote the word grief, though it’s there in spirit. I never added mortality, though it holds everything together. The wheel wasn’t meant to be exhaustive anyway. It’s just a reminder that all these pieces exist within me, waiting to be remembered.
There are things I’ll probably add as I get older. Gratitude, maybe. Wonder. Stillness. Things I’m still learning to value.
When I look at it now, I see not just my goals but my life’s outline: to build a home with my hands, to love well, to ride my bicycle across the world, to stay curious, to work hard and rest fully, to be of sound mind and uncorrupted spirit, to laugh often, to forgive easily, to die with gratitude.
Purpose isn’t a finish line. It’s an orbit. You circle through these needs and values, through the tangible and the transcendent, again and again. You don’t master them. You just keep tending to them.
The wheel reminds me that to be human is to keep rotating. To find shelter in love, freedom in service, humility in mastery, and reverence in the natural world.
Purpose, for me, is not an answer but an attention — the act of noticing that even in the smallest corner of the circle, life is still asking to be lived.
And if I ever forget, I know where to look.