Everyday Ignorance

If you got the AIR OF EARTH result on the Personal Element Quiz, here is your profile!

Personal Element: AIR

Elemental Life Role: EARTH

Type: AIR OF EARTH: The Judge/The Professor

Air’s positive qualities: Thoughtful, studious, witty, free, animated, lighthearted, open, open-minded, rational
Air’s negative qualities: “Airhead,” “spaced-out,” impractical, “flaky,” unreliable
Experiences: Inspiration, ideas, imagination, language, speech, multitasking
Roles, Jobs: Scholars, educators, students, communicators, writers

Air people think before feeling, and sometimes they think instead of feeling.  Air people are rational and often quite clever.  Some Air people are quiet, studious, and bookish, but Air is the element of speech, so Air people can also be entertaining, spinning colorful stories and being great wits who delight in wordplay.  Their gift with words may lead them to writing or communications as a career, and particularly glib Air people are excellent marketers.  Air people are often proud of their ability to think things through, and may even have disdain for those who rely on feeling or intuition.

Air people can be quite abstract, seeing things in broad strokes, seeing “the big picture.”  As such, they are excellent theorists, philosophers, economists, and politicians—people who must see life in its systems and structures, rather than in individuals and details.  Sometimes they can be radical thinkers, because they don’t necessarily value experience over theory, nor do they worry about how things have always been done.  Tradition means little to the free-thinking Air individual.

Continued personality summary, life role analysis, and overall personality type:



Air people also excel at doing several things at once, or keeping several ideas in their heads at once—“keeping many balls in the air.”  There is an exception: some Air folks are too easily distracted.  Multiple tasks scatter them, like seeds in the wind.  Some people with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD) are Air people.  Such Air people are at their best when using their powers of thought to concentrate intensely on just one task at a time.

The stereotype of the absent-minded professor is pure Air.  Air “professors” are brilliant, even dazzling, but utterly impractical.  This is the genius with untied shoes who misses appointments.  This is the “science geek” whose brilliance doesn’t seem to apply to the real world.  The Air person has charm, but often lacks social graces (which are based on following rules which seem to be of little consequence).

Since commitment doesn’t come naturally to Air (picture tying down the wind), and since they aren’t generally in touch with their feelings, Air people can have difficulty in relationships.

They are generally poor housekeepers, having a sort of scattered style, “as if a windstorm hit the place.”  If they do keep a tidy home, they do so in a systematized way.  They can become very disconnected from people and the normal concerns of day-to-day life, and be poorer for it.

However, Air people can choose to balance their airy nature with relatedness and practicality and enrich their lives.

Elemental Life Role: EARTH

Both Water life roles and Earth life roles are “grown-ups,” but the Earth type is “in charge.”  The Earth is the life role that is established, secure, solid, and authoritative.  Some people never get there, but many do.  They may not be captains of industry, but they are in charge of their own lives, unlikely to change, not *desirous* of change, and at peace with the way their lives have turned out.  It is unlikely for you to be in the Earth life role under the age of forty, but it happens.

If Earth role people have children, either they are not the primary caretaker, or their children are old enough that nurturing is not their main concern.  An Earth role person is usually married, in a long-term relationship, or just not interested in being in a relationship.  Earth life role people are probably satisfied with their career, but if not, they’ve settled—they’re not looking to move or change it much, they’re not on the fast track.  Earth life role people probably give valuable advice.

Even Earth life role folks don’t have everything they want.  When Earth life role people lack something, they tend to seek it methodically, as if with a shopping list.  The focus is not on the seeking, but on the having.

Earth life role people are often the bosses, the judges, the loan officers; the person other people have to get through or around in order to get what they want.  They are also the mentors, the guides, the sages.  All of these roles are Earth roles, bespeaking a presence that is real, meaningful, and functional in a day-to-day, earthy way.

Synthesis: AIR OF EARTH: The Judge/The Professor

Air of Earth is the authoritative reasoner.  They are the judges, the systems analysts, the sober-voiced political commentators.  They let reason, fairness, and rationality be their guide in all things, and they use those guides to make their decisions.

Another version of the Air of Earth type is the absent-minded professor.  Here we see Air as less a force of decision and more a force of pure thought.  Albert Einstein is the classic Air of Earth type—scatterbrained, disheveled, disconnected from emotional and earthly reality, and yet brilliantly authoritative in his highly intellectual field. 

These two Air of Earth types *look* very different—the buttoned-down businessman type with his conservative white shirt and club tie, or the tweedy professor type with wild hair and elbow patches.  But Air types never care all that much about their appearance, and both types merely throw on clothes appropriate to their position.  Both are concerned with reason—one for what it produces and one for its own sake.

As a spouse or parent, Air of Earth can be distant or even cold.  They function by reason and have little patience with those who expect something more or different.  They are assiduously fair, and they consider their fairness an expression of goodness and decency.  They try hard to pay attention to the needs of home and family, but there’s a lot on their minds.  The concerns of people and their feelings rarely reach the top of their priority list.