Meaning

My sister-in-law, Mary, wrote a blog (http://marymenkedick.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/purposeful-girlfriend/) about her connection to a lifelong friend and the constant restlessness they both feel that leads them to search for life’s meaning. In it she mentions surfing the net looking for ideas about this question of meaning and her friend searching ever more books hoping to find the answers she seeks. I can relate. Since my college days I’ve been plagued by this incessant gnawing to understand and find meaning (Most college students go through this phase during their philosophy 101or studying Dostoevsky in world literature, I just never outgrew it.). Good books, as well as films, music, art, teachers, etc., are great sign posts that can point the way for us, but it’s obvious that we have to make the journey to discover meaning for ourselves.

Sometimes I think that this searching for the next book, the one that can give me the "Truth" is indicative of my laziness that wants instant gratification (Gimme the "Truth" now!). It also reveals a lack of trust in my own experience that the meaning of life is closest in those rare moments when I actually show up. It’s at those times I’m in a genuine relationship to life. To be in relationship with life as a person, thing, action, place, idea or feeling is to be touched by who or what I am with. In these exceptional moments there is a real and genuine presence with this other, be it person or something else, which is so powerful I often turn away despite my craving for it.

This is the journey we must make, the journey to the meaning which is available in each moment. These exceptional moments are an expression of underlying unity which comprises one of the two sides of reality’s coin. Individuality is the other. The felt sense of connection that comes in moments of deep and present relationship is to experience these two aspects of existence simultaneously. I think this is the experience that people are trying to reach through their many and often contradictory religions, philosophies, and meanings they assign to life.

We see the rudimentary urge for connection and relationship even in the tendency of particles to form into atoms, atoms into molecules, and so on. It’s what causes us to feel for and reach out to others. The desire for this connection is responsible for the best of what humanity has created and for its acts of goodness. This desire, even if unconscious, is what drives people to go on when it’s all they can do to survive for it’s what makes survival worthwhile. Its promise makes life meaningful.

And yet this genuine presence seems too intense for most of us to experience most of the time. Because of our brokenness it can be painful. We wear shells of protective armor which are created in response to reaching out and being met by the fearful responses of other broken people. Tensing inside this armor is what leads feelings of isolation and acts of individual and collective violence.

It can feel, too, as if our sense of self is being overwhelmed or dissolving. That we might lose ourselves as our boundaries become more fluid. And so we find myriad ways to distract ourselves, to be anywhere but here.

This includes our relationship with ourselves, perhaps even more frightening to most of us than being real with others. How difficult it is to just be with myself without wanting to find something to do to occupy my time so as to keep from knowing myself better. Again, it’s fear. Fear of not being who I think I am, fear of seeing my shortcomings, fear of seeing my potential. Fear of facing the extinction of death.

So the meaning of life is hidden, not in some esoteric teaching, but behind the fear and armor that keep us from what we really desire, to be deeply and fully in relationship with others, ourselves, and with life itself in this moment. To touch this elusive state is the meaning and purpose of life to me.