Making A Meaningful Life
What does it mean to make a life? To create a life? Perhaps we need to rewrite this question as more about making a meaningful life, creating a meaningful life.
Meaning making is something that creativity coach Eric Maisel talks about a lot, and his curiosity and passion for helping others with this stemmed from something that he discovered in his early days of being a therapist: that sensitives, creatives, and spiritually minded folk tend towards depression, disillusionment and dissatisfaction more than ‘normal’ people, because they are born with a need to behold life as one with meaning.
We are meaning making creatures, whether as artists or simply as the creators of our lives. We can’t help it. We dig deep. We want soul. We cannot live on the surface. When we feel lost and meaningless, we feel dispirited, flat, stuck, and hopeless. We need to make life mean. Not just in what we do, but in the ways that we spend the time between.
When we read a book, or watch a movie, about someone’s life’s journey, we are given the highlights. Hmmm, actually isn’t that also what we see and do on social media?! The extraordinary gets highlighted. The joys, the successes, the celebrations, as well as the challenges and grief-ridden times. You could say that, apart from the bizarre photos of someone’s dinner, we mostly are saturated by the dramatic moments of other’s lives. The grand experiences or situations that make for great reading or viewing, from the safety of our homes. As far as the dualities of ordinary versus extraordinary is concerned, we tend to veer towards the extraordinary. Why? Because it makes us feel something. It’s colourful, bold, emotive, and shiny. And we are a people who get a fix from the shiny and dramas served endlessly to us through our screens, and for our entertainment.
The quiet doesn’t stand a chance does it? It’s ‘boring’, flat, uninspiring when nothing seems to be happening. We seek the big because the roller-coaster of feelings and events captures our attention. It sucks us in.
I used to read those shitty magazines that you see on supermarket shelves. The ones with unflattering photos of ‘celebrities’ with bold one liner statements plastered over them. It’s the shock tactics, the manipulation, the propaganda of the strange cult of the famous, all glitz and glamour, that fascinates us. We soak it up, and then, as I found, feel dirty and hollow afterwards. It wasn’t food for the soul that’s for sure. Simply titillation to keep the merry go round alive!
Meaning is linked to soul. They swim in the same waters. In the same oceans of depth. That’s not the shallow waters of the quick sparkly fix!
The pull, like a moth to a flame, to these, is an addiction. We get a buzz, and we get that high even more so when it’s us posting, and we get the likes. Oh boy! The affirmations and validation of social media. We, like little chicks, our mouths open to be fed by these momentary and surface scraps. What is that about? I’m certainly not immune, don't get me wrong. Hell no! But the low that can happen in the between spaces gives us a clue.
We’re not so good with the nothing space. The ordinary. The day to day, nothing special parts of our lives. We get uncomfortable here. Restless. Our fears, doubts and worthlessness rise up to the top like scum, sitting there heavy and unattractive to our eyes.
What would it be like to allow that? Do let what comes to the surface be seen? To be with the laundry of our lives. And, gasp, what would it be like to learn to accept, embrace, and even love these times? What if this was life, the bits between the fabulous? And what could we make with this material, that was deeply intimate to us? Honest. True. Real. And oh so beautiful, if we let it be so.
It’s not enough to find something big to hang our meaning for life, our purpose, upon. Because the ordinary moments will be far greater. So, as Mr Maisel invites us, how can we give these times meaning? How can we infuse the normal parts of our lives with grace, with depth, with the substance for making a rich and full life?
What would you like your life to mean?
We think we want what others have. But do we? Do we truly know what we want? And more than that, and more importantly, what do you have that you can give to life? How can you serve? Do you realise that joy and service go together?
So much of exploring this is connected to power. The dynamics of power. Where we give ours away, where we take it, what we think power is and looks like. We project onto the glossy star this power, and let it dazzle us so that we are blinded to our own. Power means ‘to be able’, and it is simply the ability to be able to respond to life. It is deeply connected to responsibility. To taking responsibility for our lives, and for our choices.
Do you know that you have choice? And with choice, comes power and responsibility? What is your relationship to power? What is your relationship to responsibility?
Are you comfortable with these words and what they ripple through you?
Finally, if we are looking at making a life. Our life. Then we need to also be curious as to how the following plays out for us. Ask yourself the following questions:
Do you need permission?
Do you give away your authority? And if so, to whom? To what? And, why?
Do you get caught in the sticky spider web of what I call, the 3 P’s?: Perfectionism; procrastination and people-pleasing.
What is your relationship with each of these?
Despite, or because, of all of the above, what life would you like to make? What would you like for your life to mean? How do you think you can infuse those ordinary moments with meaning?
Go forth into life from this moment, and breathe in and out all the possibilities that life has to offer. it’s all there, everything that you think you desire. It just may have been waiting patiently for you to lift your gaze away from the razzle, and straight into its eyes!
