What the Life Wheel Couldn’t Measure
Last week, I took a test called the Life Wheel with some of my colleagues. It measured different aspects of life, including personal growth and learning, finances, spirituality and purpose, mental and emotional health, work and career, health and fitness, family and relationships, and even social life and fun. At first, it looked like another simple self-assessment exercise, but as we discussed our scores, I was surprised by how accurately it revealed parts of our lives that often go unnoticed. It wasn’t just measuring what we had accomplished; it was quietly exposing what we had neglected.
The exercise made me realize that life is rarely unbalanced overnight. We don’t suddenly wake up disconnected from our families or discover that we’ve completely ignored our health. These things happen gradually. We become so focused on growing one part of our lives that another begins to shrink without us noticing. By the time we finally pay attention, we often realize that something has already been lost.
It also made me question something I had never really thought about before. Why do we only acknowledge loss when someone dies? Why do we reserve eulogies for funerals, as though death is the only thing worth mourning? It seems to me that life is full of quieter deaths that never receive the same attention. Friendships fade without an argument. Dreams disappear beneath responsibility. Relationships slowly become memories while everyone involved is still alive. Even parts of ourselves vanish as we grow older, yet we rarely stop to grieve them.
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Perhaps that is one of the strange realities of being human. We are constantly saying goodbye without realizing it. Sometimes we lose people, but other times we lose possibilities, identities, ambitions, innocence, or even the version of ourselves we once believed we would become. These endings rarely come with ceremonies. There are no flowers, no black clothing, and no gathering of family and friends. Life simply moves on as though nothing happened, while something significant has quietly come to an end.
Maybe that is why the Life Wheel stayed with me long after the exercise was over. It wasn’t because of the numbers or the categories. It was because it forced me to look at my life as a whole instead of through the narrow lens of achievement. It reminded me that success in one area does not erase neglect in another, and that we often celebrate what is growing without noticing what is dying.
I have come to believe that every one of us carries invisible eulogies. Not only for the people we have lost, but for seasons that ended too soon, opportunities we never took, relationships that slowly slipped away, and dreams we quietly abandoned because life demanded something different. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is not that these things come to an end, but that we are often too busy living to notice they were disappearing in the first place.
Maybe that is the part of life no wheel can ever truly measure.
