Making Sense: Agency, Solvency, and Satisfaction as Soul’s Companions
How three words from a dream became guides for strength, balance, and the art of savoring life in a world on fire.
original photo, “The Path” by B. Littleton
“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.”
— C.G. Jung
This essay began in the quiet hours of the morning when I woke from a dream. I listen to my dreams; they have always been guides, sometimes tricksters, sometimes teachers. That morning, instead of an image or a scene, I woke with three words pressing against me with the kind of clarity I could not ignore: agency, solvency, satisfaction. They felt less like ideas and more like instructions, as if the dream had placed something in my hands and asked me to carry it forward. I knew then that this was not a passing thought. It was a threshold, a summons to walk further into questions I had been circling for years.
This essay is, at heart, an attempt to make sense. The phrase carries a double meaning for me: to seek clarity, yes, but also to live sensuously, to stay close to the texture of life. I am trying to make sense of how we live in a world pressed by new forms of fascism, climate disruption, and shifting powers, while at the same time protecting an inner foundation that can hold such pressure without collapse. I am also trying to make sense in the older, deeper way: to taste and touch and feel life fully enough that it continues to reveal itself as worth living. Between the urgency of survival and the intimacy of awe lies a path of balance, and for me, the touchstones of that balance are agency, solvency, and satisfaction.
Agency is not something we can delay until conditions improve. I learned this in my own life when I was groomed in childhood to stay polite, to remain quiet, to keep my voice hidden. The adage that children were to be seen and not heard became a governor I never knew how to release. As an adult, whenever I had to speak in public, I wilted. Safety lived only in my private journals, where words could spill without judgment. But I still remember the day my mother and her friends sat by the pool, drinks in hand, reading and analyzing my poetry aloud as if it were theirs to dissect. I felt my insides collapse. Any fragile thread of personal power was eclipsed by shame. I locked myself in the bathroom and retched, my body carrying the weight of exposure without consent. In that moment, I knew in my bones that the personal is always political, that the silencing of one voice is never only about one child, but about how power operates in the world.
It took years to reclaim what had been stolen in that moment. I never truly felt seen again until I was standing at the front of a graduate classroom as a professor, guiding teachers through the writing of their theses. There, I felt agency return, not because I demanded it, but because the work itself had chosen me. I was no longer the silenced child. I was the steward of expression, the guide who could show others how to find their own voice. In that role, I knew I was finally standing in my full empowerment. Teaching was not just a profession; it was a reclamation. It was the task I had been bred for, and also the work my soul had been guiding me toward all along.
Agency is born in the moment we choose presence over objectification. Every time we meet another as real, not as a label or a category, we practice self-agency. Martin Buber gave language to this in his description of the I–Thou relationship. When a parent kneels to meet a child’s eyes, when two strangers pause long enough to actually see one another, something sacred is exchanged. That choice to encounter rather than manage is what keeps us human.
Agency also shows itself in how we choose our stance toward suffering. Even when outer freedoms collapse, there remains the freedom to decide who we will be in response. Viktor Frankl discovered this in the concentration camps, where life was stripped to the bone. He saw that a person could still choose to comfort a fellow prisoner, share a crust of bread, or lift their gaze to a sunrise beyond the barbed wire. Those choices were not small. They were sovereignty itself. Frankl’s witness reminds us that agency is not only what we do but how we meet what cannot be changed.
For many women, agency requires stepping out of the inherited roles that have defined us for too long. When life feels like a performance staged for someone else’s approval, it takes courage to walk away from those scripts. Marion Woodman described this as leaving “the father’s house,” the moment we trust our dreams, our bodies, and our imaginations more than the external voices that tell us who we should be.
Agency is also the act of claiming subjecthood in a world that prefers we remain objects. Simone de Beauvoir named this truth: that women have long been defined as “the Other,” existing in service to someone else’s story. To claim one’s own projects, one’s own education, one’s own life as ends in themselves is to push against centuries of resistance. De Beauvoir insisted that this was not an easy freedom. It is costly, sometimes lonely, but it is the only way to live a life that is truly one’s own.
For those whose fathers were absent, agency can take the form of healing invisibility. A daughter who grew up overachieving to earn love may reach adulthood exhausted, still waiting for a recognition that never comes. Susan Schwartz writes that agency begins when she stops waiting and turns toward herself, when she parents herself with compassion, when she becomes her own witness. Out of the wound of absence, a new presence is born, one that does not rely on anyone else to confirm her worth.
Taken together, these perspectives remind us that agency is not a distant ideal but a daily act: the decision to be present, to choose meaning, to step out of false roles, to live as subject, to heal what was absent. Each path asks courage of us. Each path reminds us that in a world on fire, agency is no longer optional. It is the ground of responsibility, the refusal to live passively or by someone else’s script. It is the decision, renewed each day, to stand as author of one’s own life and as participant in a world that desperately needs fully present human beings.
But agency alone is not enough. To live with agency requires being resourced, solvent in ways that go far beyond money. I know this because I have lived on both sides: there were seasons when I gave too much, worked too much, tried too hard, and found myself running on empty. On the outside, I looked successful, but inside I was dry, depleted, bankrupt. Solvency is what keeps us from collapsing under our own commitments.
Meaning itself has been one of my greatest forms of solvency. When life narrowed to difficulty, holding on to a why kept me from unraveling. Frankl insisted that even in the camps, the memory of a loved one or the possibility of future work could be enough to sustain a soul. I have known my own versions of this: clinging to the thought of what I was still meant to teach, still meant to write, still meant to love. That meaning was my reserve when everything else was thin.
I have also learned that solvency comes through the relationships that nourish rather than drain. I know the difference: the conversations that leave me hollow and the rare, true encounters that feed me for weeks. Buber called this the I–Thou moment, and I have felt it sitting with a student in despair, or walking with a friend through grief, or even standing alone under a great tree. These encounters are a form of sustenance as real as food. They feed the soul, reminding me that to be solvent is also to stay in conversation with that deeper ground of being.
But balance within is just as necessary. There were years when I drove myself to exhaustion chasing perfection and approval, until my body finally rebelled. The migraines, the anxiety, the fatigue were symptoms of what Marion Woodman would call spiritual insolvency, a soul cut off from body and imagination. Solvency returned slowly, through listening to my dreams, giving myself permission to rest, and allowing creativity to replenish what achievement could not. Soul has always been my greatest guide in life, and each dream a conversation from soul to me, inviting me to tender my experiences into meaning. The unconscious existed long before the ego formed as the operating system of life on this planet. In balancing ego with soul, I see why agency, solvency, and satisfaction are so essential: they relieve the ego of early conditions, patterns, and trauma bonds so that spirituality can be embodied in conscious life, and not just relegated to the cosmos.
Solvency also means independence. De Beauvoir made clear that without financial independence, freedom is fragile. I remember the weight of dependence, and the relief of finally standing on my own. But she also reminds me that solvency is existential, holding fast to my identity, refusing to let it dissolve into someone else’s. That lesson has carried me through more than one relationship where I might have disappeared had I not chosen otherwise.
And then there is the emotional solvency I have had to build where absence left its mark. Growing up with silence or neglect carves deep deficits. I know what it is to look outward for approval, to live always in debt to someone else’s recognition. Schwartz describes this as living on borrowed value. My own healing has been the slow work of re-parenting myself, of learning to trust my reflection without waiting for someone else to confirm it. That inner treasury of self-regard has taken time to build, but it is the foundation that steadies me now.
To live solvently is not simply to survive, but to have enough in reserve to give. It is to carry enough meaning, enough love, enough balance, enough independence, enough self-worth that when the world asks something of us, and it will, we are not emptied by the asking. We are resourced enough to contribute beauty, justice, and imagination to a world that is starving for them.
And still, something more is needed. Agency steadies our stance, solvency fills our reserves, but satisfaction teaches us why it matters to be alive in the first place. I have felt it in fleeting moments: the gaze of a horse meeting mine at one in the morning during a winter storm, the long glide of a wave that seemed to carry me forever, the first crash of high tide echoing through my body, the sensation of silk sliding across my skin, the quiet exhale of a lover’s sigh. These are not indulgences; they are anchors. They remind me that life is not only about survival but about savoring.
Satisfaction begins in the body. For too long, I chased transcendence while dismissing embodiment. True fulfillment comes when spirit and matter are reconciled, when the split between psyche and flesh is healed. Marion Woodman wrote about this reunion as essential to wholeness, and I have felt it in tears that rise with music, in the awe of walking under tall trees, in the laughter that shakes the body free. These are the moments when life feels whole.
Fulfillment is never the goal of life but its byproduct. It emerges when we are devoted to love, to creative work, or to carrying suffering with dignity. Viktor Frankl saw this truth in the camps: satisfaction is not found by pursuing pleasure, but by living into meaning. In my own life, I have discovered the same. The days I feel most full are not when I have sought satisfaction, but when I have forgotten myself in purpose.
Moments of deep satisfaction also arise in luminous encounters, when we truly meet another person or the natural world and are changed. Martin Buber called this the I–Thou meeting, and I have felt it in the gaze of a friend, the beauty of a hummingbird, the belonging I feel beneath an old tree. These experiences remind me that satisfaction is relational, born of presence and reverence.
Authenticity is another source of deep contentment. Fulfillment does not come by conforming to imposed roles but by living the projects that express freedom. Simone de Beauvoir insisted that this was the only way to inhabit one’s subjecthood, and I know her words to be true. The satisfaction I feel when I am writing, teaching, or guiding others is different from borrowed praise. It is rooted in knowing that I am doing what is mine to do.
Satisfaction can also be born from loss transformed. When absence is no longer the measure of worth, when a daughter stops waiting for recognition that never comes, she can discover a deeper fulfillment. Susan Schwartz writes that healing the father wound opens the possibility of building a life from one’s own wholeness. I have known this in my own healing, the joy of creating beauty out of what once felt like deficit.
To feel satisfaction is also to remember our entanglement with the more-than-human world. Our bodies, our senses, even our language evolved in dialogue with wind, stone, bird, and water. David Abram describes this as the spell of the sensuous, the reciprocity between human beings and the earth that is always ongoing. I recognize it in my own body when I walk barefoot in the soil, when coyotes call at dusk, when the smell of rain touches desert air. These are satisfactions that remind me I belong.
To live satisfied also requires allowing sensuality into consciousness. Anaïs Nin insisted that presence was not indulgence but discipline, a practice of living awake. We touch life most fully when we pause long enough to taste the peach, to feel fabric against our skin, to surrender to the fragrance of tea rising in steam. Sensuality, she reminds us, is how the soul drinks.
To live satisfied is to live sensuously. It is to make sense of life not only in thought but in touch, taste, sound, and sight. It is not escape from the world’s turmoil but a way of seeing through it, under it, beyond it, a way that insists life, even here, even now, is good.
When I woke from that dream with the words agency, solvency, satisfaction pressing against me, I could not have known how much they would unfold into companions for this moment of history. What began as three simple directives has revealed itself as a map, not out of difficulty, but into it. Each word is an ally, a reminder, a resource.
Agency stands beside me as the courage to choose, to be present, to claim my voice even when silence feels safer. Solvency walks with me as the grounding of meaning, the replenishment of relationship, the balance of body and soul, the independence and self-worth that allow me to endure and to give. Satisfaction arrives as the gift of embodiment, the awe that reawakens me to beauty, the sensuous reminder that life is still worth savoring.
Together, these three make sense of life in both meanings of the phrase. They give clarity when the world tilts and fractures, and they restore sensuous presence when life feels thin or mechanical. They steady me in the face of fear and return me to the wonder that nourishes the soul. They are not abstract virtues; they are living practices that keep me aligned with a higher power, with trust in a wisdom larger than my own.
And so I circle back to where this began: a dream, an invitation, a threshold. What I know now is that agency, solvency, and satisfaction are not just concepts to be understood but companions to be lived. They are gifts from the soul, the deeper ground that preceded ego and will outlast it. They are the inner strength, the wisdom, and the trust we need to navigate a world on fire without losing sight of the soul’s language. They are how we make sense, both in clarity and in embodiment, both in survival and in joy. To live with them is to walk not only with resilience, but with reverence, to know that even here, even now, life is asking us not merely to endure, but to awaken.
written by Bren Littleton
original photo, “The Path” by B. Littleton
Tin Flea Press c. 2025