Extracting Meaning from LIfe

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If you want to make an extract of orange to find the essence of it, you can 

  • Squeeze the juice out and the essence seems sweet
  • Grate the skin and it appears to be intense and tough
  • Slice the pith and find an essence of bitterness and astringency
  • Examine the pips and find an essence of inheritance or resurrection
  • Go back the tree and find the seasons
  • Go back to the orchard and find belonging
The same is true if you're looking for meaning in your life. The meaning you find is the meaning your personal spectacles are directed towards finding. Or the meaning your personal experiences have led you to. You look through maternal spectacles and the meaning of a life is instinctual love. You look through achievement spectacles and the meaning of a human life is the highest rung of the professional ladder, the most prestigious prize that the person won in their life. You look through victim spectacles, or famine and war spectacles and you find meaning in survival. You look through logical spectacles and human life seems the result of a series of random probabilites, intrinsically meaningless until you have an intellectual puzzle to solve. Ah! A beautiful equation! You look through the spectacles of an artist and the price of a life is the degree to which they brought their experience of beauty to life, expressed the essence of their inspiration. You look through the spectacles of a spiritual seeker and you find a mysterious purpose.

It is true that all these things are marvels of human blossoming, it is true. But a whole life is not confined to the meaning that we give it any more than an orange exists for its marvellous smell. Is a life worthless once you have achieved an Olympic medal or a healthy family? Is a life worthless if it only influences one other person, if it comes fourth in a race? If it does nothing but breathe and eat and feel?

The problem here is that the attempt to give life meaning at all is, excuse the bad pun, demeaning. A tiger doesn't need meaning, it is a tiger. It doesn't need a meaningful job or voluntary work or be universally loved to give itself purpose. Its purpose is to be a tiger. The essence of orange is not to be found by removing bits of it. The essence of orange is irreducibly being an orange. 

The essence, purpose and meaning of me is to be me, from moment to moment, through all the times of my life from birth to death. That's it.

Although I know this, it's so difficult for me to approach my life this way, letting go of the impulse to find meaning and the belief that somehow there is one meaning out there that is going to make my life experience a different and somehow better one. Perhaps one with a legacy that will live on beyond this body. 

But today this is what I am seeing. Meaning is not intrinsic in life. Any meaning is a label we give that requires us to dismiss or ignore most of what a life actually is, most especially the part of it that is always changing. And as we saw with the orange, the label for any life at any moment will be different depending on who's doing the labelling. 

So if I'm always following the trail of 'what does this mean?' I'm going to miss the full uncategorizable experience of being me. And I really don't want to do that.

These blogs are explorations of adult emotional development and how understanding it can help us to live. I am a retired psychiatrist, mother and zen-based mindfulness teacher. In this blog I try to look the reality of life and death squarely in the eye. I am aware this is not for everyone. If you are squeamish about the idea please consider this your trigger warning.

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