If you think about it, you’ll discover that your past experiences provide you with present-day meaning opportunities. You can learn both from past experiences that didn’t feel meaningful and from past experiences that did feel meaningful. Your past experiences provide you with all the information you need in order to make smart guesses about how to create meaning today.
Think about that. You can use your memory to make meaning. That’s pretty exciting!
Let’s say, for instance, that you have it in your head that you love your automobile. You wouldn’t think about not driving to work. At the same time, your commute is getting worse and worse and leaving you more and more frazzled. To put it one way, the meaning has drained out of driving your car back and forth to work. In kirism, the philosophy of life I’ve developed, we talk about “stepping to the side” of situations like these in order to gain awareness. How might you do that here?
Well, you might ask yourself, “Which driving experiences have I found meaningful and which driving experiences haven’t I found meaningful?” To get at this, you might make two lists. On the first list, you might find items like “Driving long distances on the open road,” “Driving with my son down a country road listening to music,” and “Driving across Canada after my mother died.” On the second list you might find, “My commute when I lived just outside of Boston” “Ferrying the kids all over the place all day every Saturday,” and “My current daily commute.”
What have you learned? That driving per se is not what has proven meaningful to you over the years. Rather, it’s driving in particular contexts and for particular reasons. And that’s exactly how meaning works! The same exact thing—driving your car, for instance—only feels meaningful sometimes, depending on the context, the situation, your mood, and for all sorts of other reasons. It isn’t driving that’s meaningful. It’s certain specific driving experiences that are or aren’t meaningful.
Coming to this realization—that driving your car isn’t what’s meaningful but rather driving your car in certain contexts and for certain reasons—allows you to finally address the question you’ve been avoiding addressing for the longest time: “Is it really imperative that I drive to work? Or should I take the train?” By getting clear on which driving experiences have felt meaningful and which haven’t, you can make new meaning today by investing meaning in traveling to work on the train.
The very idea of taking public transportation may still feel like a diminishment and a meaning loss. We know all the good reasons for taking public transportation, from doing our part environmentally to using that new-found commute time to get some work done to avoiding something we are actively hating, like driving in the commute. Still, we may feel diminished at the prospect of taking public transportation. It can feel like a defeat, a loss of privilege, or somehow embarrassing.
You’ll likely still feel an emotional attachment to driving because driving connects to many of your most meaningful experiences and to your very identity as a free person. But you can nevertheless “step to the side” of that emotional attachment and seize what is now a terrific meaning opportunity, to take the train and read a book, listen to music, learn a language, write your novel, get some work done, or just relax.
At the very least, you could give this new meaning opportunity a try and see how it feels. You can’t tell beforehand how any new experience is going to feel, whether it’s going to feel joyous or boring, taxing or relaxing, or meaningful or devoid of meaning. All you can do is try it out and see. In our scenario, you take a meaningful inventory of your driving experiences, conclude that taking the train has meaning potential, and buy your ticket and ride.
To use the language of kirism, you invest meaning in taking public transportation. This inner conversation might sound like the following: “Driving has felt meaningful on a ton of different occasions but driving to work in this lousy commute doesn’t feel meaningful at all. It is only stressing me out and ruining my equilibrium. So, I’m going to give public transportation a shot. More than that, I’m going to invest in it—I’m going to give it a serious try. Who knows, maybe I’ll not only arrive at work in a better mood but maybe I’ll even have had a meaningful experience as well!”
In this scenario, you haven’t given up your car, which you love. But you have given up driving to work, which you hate. You haven’t reduced the meaning in your life by giving up that terrible drive. You’ve likely increased it, by trying something new with high meaning potential. We haven’t been taught to think this clearly about meaning and so we usually don’t. We rarely ask this tremendously important question: “What exactly have I found meaningful in the past?” But by asking this question and by investigating the past, we help insure that today will be experienced as meaningful.
After these investigations, it has become clear that driving down the open road feels wonderful and that driving on a clogged highway doesn’t. So, we take the train and see how that goes. We haven’t given up our car. We can drive it on Sundays, we can roam the countryside, we can drive with the music loud. What we have, though, is exercised our freedom to try a new meaning opportunity. That is how meaning is made. Stuck in the commute, meaning is draining away just as surely as gas is being guzzled. By taking the train, we take a chance on new meaning. By adopting this kirist policy, we have turned meaning into a wellspring and an infinite resource.
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Please check out Lighting the Way: How Kirism Answers Life’s Toughest Question, in which kirism is described. It is available here.
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