Notes on Finding Meaning in Life

"Lead, as I do, the high-flown virtue back to earth —

yes, back to body and life; that it may give the earth its

meaning, a human meaning! May your spirit and your

virtue serve the meaning of the earth. . . . Man and

man's earth are still unexhausted and undiscovered..."

 - Nietzsche

I want to write a few words about what it means to find meaning in one's life. This is a common topic in therapy. More than just not always feeling depressed or anxious, most people I have encountered seek a sense of purpose or meaning in their lives. I have to confess now that when this subject has come up with clients, I've often felt a bit unqualified or inadequate. While I have a few tools or questions that might help lead a client towards a sense of purpose, the endeavor has always seemed so uncertain, and so mysterious, that I've usually felt that I'm groping in the dark right next to my equally lost client. This confusion led me to want to think more about what it really does mean to feel meaning in one's life, and this essay is the result of those reflections.

As I was beginning to write this, I remembered an e-mail conversation with a friend many years ago. This friend was going through an existential crisis at the time and, in one of her e-mails, she asked: "Found any meaning anywhere?" The question always struck me as pretty absurd, because I've always had the feeling that there is meaning in every moment. Life has always seemed chock-full of meaning to me. It's not "out there" waiting to be found, but infused in everything. So why can't we always feel it? Why does one person feel that there is no meaning, and another person feel that meaning is obvious?

Very often we are insensible to meaning. We've all felt this at one time or another in our life. I think of Hamlet complaining: "How weary, stale flat and unprofitable/ Seem to me all the uses of this world." And what makes us insensible? What separates us from meaning? What creates those moments where it's as if we're standing outside the window of life pathetically looking in. Let me propose a theory: meaningless is the experience that emerges when we're hooked by all of our habitual addictions and distractions. At the smallest level, our addictions to our phones and our TV shows and all the luxuries that we spend our days chasing (restaurant reservations and fun vacations and trendy running shoes and so on and so forth). More intensely, addictions to substances, gambling, sex, power. Most intensely, our addictions to our selves - that is, our addiction to maintaining our idea of who we think we are or need to be. That was Hamlet's addiction, for the record, and the reason why he still stands as a universal emblem of what it means to be human.

The Englightenment philosopher Blaise Pascal called this tendency to get distracted from true meaning divertissement, which we can simply translate as "diversion." He identified our unusual capacity as humans to avoid reality by pursuing superficial pleasures. Unfortunately, the tendency to divertissement seems to be inherent in humanity. We just tend to get lost or, put differently, hooked in the daily chase.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that meaning is always available to us. It's waiting for us every moment, in fact. It merely requires letting go of the chase for just a moment and really paying attention. If we can stop rushing around for a second, and get quiet, the deeper meanings of life naturally unfold.

But what really is the meaning that emerges? In our culture we've tended to pose this question of the "meaning of life" as a philosophical question. The more technical term for this area of study is teleology. That refers to the search for the ultimate end or goal of things. I don't believe, however, that a discursive analysis of meaning can ultimately yield a satisfying answer for us. We could argue the question until the end of time.

Rather than a kind of rational knowing, I define meaning as more of a felt sense. You can notice that, in addition to the rational kind of knowing we use in our daily lives, we have other forms knowing. One of those forms is felt sense knowing. I'm indebted here to the great teacher Philip Moffitt who emphasizes the significance of this kind of knowing in his work. To sum up, what we want to do is to find a way to - just for a moment - set aside our addictions and the daily chase; to get quiet for just a moment; and then to try to observe life as it is. And as we begin to see things more clearly and precisely, a felt sense of meaning begins to emerge. If this all seems far-fetched, that's okay. I'm not making a logical argument so much as making a crazy guess at what meaning is and inviting you to test it out for yourself.

As I was preparing to write this, I got curious about the etymology of "to mean" and looked it up. It derives from an Old English word (maenan) that means more or less what "to mean" means today. I also discovered, however, that the word maenan in Old English also means "to moan." The general view seems to be that this linguistic similarity is just a coincidence. But who really knows? I let my mind wander a bit and entertained the idea that "to mean" is also "to moan"...

What, after all, do we actually experience when we slow down and look deeper into life? What we first usually see is the multitude of ways that we suffer and others suffer (this is why we tend to stay distracted all the time). We see that we're all getting old and dying (one day at a time). We notice the multitude of worries and cares that burden our daily experience. And - the more we see our deep suffering, we sometimes awaken to a feeling of compassion for ourselves and others. In short, when we look for meaning we find lots and lots of moaning. Part of the deeper meaning of life, simply, is pain, and the compassion that hopefully grows around our pain.

"Moaning" has a few connotations, however, and I have to admit that I thought as well of the erotic sense of the word. Moaning occurs as well in ecstasy. So as we slow down and let meaning emerge in our life, alongside suffering and compassion, we have a felt sense of ecstatic joy. The profound joys of connecting with others; the simple joy of being alive at all rather than being dead in the ground. So meaning is moaning in every sense...sorrow, compassion and joy all mixed together. A moaning deep at the core of life that we see when we finally clear the gum from our eyes. And when we're fully soaked in it all - the indescribable beauty and pain and compassion and sadness and joy - there you have meaning.

You don't need to be a professional meditator or a guru. Meaning might emerge in a quiet coffee with a friend; on a long hike in the forest; on a solitary walk at night; in the ecstasy and pain of love; listening to a favorite record; watching a fire slowly burn down to the embers; listening to the rain during a storm. The thing is just to find moments when you can really stop the chase and start to pay attention. You don't chase after meaning; rather, you learn to listen and it's right there where it always was all along. Perhaps, it's one of those things we can't see because it's so close.

I began with a quote by Nietzsche so I'll end with a poem of his entitled "Midnight's Song":

 Midnight's Song

O man! Listen!

What does the deep midnight say?

"I was sleeping, sleeping...And from a deep dream I am now awake.

The world is deep,

Deeper than day can comprehend.

Deep is its suffering -

Joy, though, is deeper...

Suffering says: Go! Die!

But all joy wants eternity

Wants deep, deep eternity!"