Let’s continue our conversation about meaning opportunities that we began last Monday.
How you talk to yourself about your meaning opportunities will naturally be personal and idiosyncratic. Here is how one internal conversation might go:
My big sources of meaning are my work and the people I love. But I know that keeping to a certain disciplined regimen, where I exercise, eat well, and create, is a big help in keeping meaning afloat. Therefore, I am putting exercise and meal preparation into the category of meaning opportunities, rather than into the category of chores. I’m likewise putting creating into that same category, even though I have doubts about whether what I paint is any good. My hope is that if I pay attention to the big meaning investments I’ve made in my work and in the people I love, and if I also seize daily meaning opportunities like exercising and creating, I will experience life as meaningful.
By keeping your eye on the main point, that while the experience of meaning can’t be guaranteed you can aim yourself in its direction and make reasoned efforts to experience it, you become relatively free from needing any of your efforts to produce that experience. You have positioned yourself to create more meaning in your life. You learn how to take risks in the service of meaning, just as you risk when you make an investment in the stock market, opting to invest in a certain career, a certain creative effort, a certain relationship, a certain adventure or a certain conversation.
You keep your eyes peeled for your next meaning opportunities, you make short-range plans and long-range plans for seizing such opportunities, you live your life purposes, and you assess your experiences. In this way, you “stay on top of meaning.”
You must regularly take the temperature of your experiences because you may not have gotten lucky, some major meaning investment may not be paying off, and you may have to make some big change. Say that you opt for stewardship, choose a career in environmental protection, achieve some successes, some near-successes, and many failures, and discover that you are not being gifted with the experience of meaning from your efforts. You may still hold stewardship as one of your life purposes but you must reckon with the reality that you are experiencing too little meaning from your environmental efforts. These crises and conflicts arise all the time in the lives of real people and when they arise they require our attention.
What elementary school teacher, novelist, environmentalist, actor, attorney—what human being—hasn’t found herself at such a crossroads? Who hasn’t found himself at such a crossroads in a long-term relationship? Many meaning opportunities and meaning investments will not pan out even though they completely align with your life purposes.
Knowing this, you need not feel shocked or even surprised when such a dreadful thing happens. You do not have to doubt your methods or fret that you have no recourse. You have clear and ample recourse: to reconsider your life purposes in the light of your actual experiences and to see what new meaning investments you might make and what new meaning opportunities you might seize, ones that align with your reconsidered life purposes.
You take aim at meaning and you keep your eye on the ball. If you live this way, you will never run out of meaning, as it is a wellspring and a renewable resource—once you understand what it is, how it operates, and how to finesse into existence.
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