Your Menu of Meaning Opportunities
This is the third part of a short series on the idea of meaning opportunities. Today we look at a tricky idea: that making an effort to coax meaning into existence may not reward you with the experience meaning. And still, you will have made meaning on that day! Here’s what I mean.
You can make potent meaning even on days when you aren’t rewarded with the experience of meaning. Because you’ve lived that day in accordance with your values and your life purposes and in alignment with your ideas about meaning, you “know” that the day was rich in meaning, no matter how meaningless it actually felt.
You tried and that effort carries its own positive valence and, very likely, its own felt sense of meaning. And, on many days and for many moments you will experience meaning. Because you have these new methods, new language, and new outlook, the likelihood is great that you will experience enough meaning so as to be able to say, “Life is meaningful enough. And I am living my life purposes!”
Let’s turn our learning over these past three weeks into a series of activities that will help you really understand the idea of meaning opportunities.
First, please create your menu of meaning opportunities. Think through what sorts of activities or ways of being provoke the psychological experience of meaning in you. Your list might include big abstract categories like creating, relationships, service, activism or “just being,” and very specific activities, events, and states of being, like “visiting with Aunt Rose,” “looking at some Van Goghs and Gauguins,” “practicing loving kindness,” or “spending two hours daily working on my novel.” I think you will genuinely enjoy creating this list; but whether you find the task enjoyable or just work, please do create it.
Second, think through what it would be like to intentionally create a day that included items from your menu of meaning opportunities and that also included the other things that you need to do in life (like chores and work for pay) and want to do (like watching a television show). What would such a day concretely look like? How might one day differ from another day depending on which meaning opportunities you chose and which tasks and pleasures you included?
Take some time and draw up various “schedules” or pictures of different days, playing with the notion that a day, to be lived mindfully and intentionally, is really a certain sort of negotiation, a balance of chores, relaxations, and meaning-making efforts. You might want to include the following idea: the idea of a morning meaning check-in, a minute or two that you spend at the beginning of each day choosing your meaning investments for that day.
Third, pick one of the days you’ve created and live it. You might want to live one such day on Tuesday, a different one on Wednesday, a different one on Thursday, and so on, to get a sense of how different days feel. Experiment! Although this is “real work,” it may also prove enjoyable and even exciting.
If you feel like it, you might answer the following questions.
- How was the experience for you? What transpired and what did you learn?
- How hard or how easy was it to create a menu of meaning opportunities? Were you surprised by any of the “items” on your list?
- How hard or how easy was it to “create a day” that included both regular things (like chores and relaxation) and meaning opportunities?
- How hard or how easy was it to “live a day” that included both regular things (like chores and relaxation) and meaning opportunities?
- Anything else about this process that intrigued you?
I hope you’ve found this short series on “meaning opportunities” valuable. If you’d like to learn more, please take a look at my book Life Purpose Boot Camp.
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