The meaning of life

Before I started writing this article, I deliberated on what to title this — “The meaning of our life?” “The meaning of my life?” “The meaning of life?” I eventually settled on the last one, for one reason: Our lives, even though the standard media narrative dictates that we should each be unique and deal with our problems on our own, have much more in common when it comes to finding meaning.

All of us go through our days compartmentalizing different sections of it — some sections great, others not so much, and yet others that we don’t like at all. Most of us live hoping that our days add up to something, and that it provides some meaning to our life. While the things that provide meaning to each of our lives can be quite disparate, their essence is common: they have a soul in them that can propel us toward finding even more meaning in our lives. For me, that meaning comes through writing and helping others.

Writing well involves acute observation skills. You start out observing everything around you, trying to make sense of it, and then you distill all of it into words carefully stringed together, almost as if you were fitting everything perfectly together. For me, the meaning that results from writing well is something else. It saved me at a time when I was depressed and miserable a few years back. At the time, the only recourse I had was to put words on the page, and I mercilessly stayed up late in the nights writing, pouring whatever was inside me on to the page mercilessly. It was a kind of a ritual, the days being exhausting and soul-sucking, but the nights cleansing me through the act of writing. Whatever was eating away at me — I created a distance or a semblance of the distance by putting it on the page. It’s the closest I have ever come to finding meaning, and I am grateful for that.

Helping others, whether it be at work, or at the local library volunteering at the adult literacy initiative, or anywhere possible for that matter, makes me feel like I am making a difference. Something is a little better off with my help than it was before, and we can realize that by looking at the joy that results — it’s a feeling like none other. The meaning does not have to be realized on a grand scale always, we can also find it in the little moments of gratitude and meaning.

Something that makes us feel alive, gives us goosebumps, for a moment makes us see things absolutely clearly — those are the things we need to cling to and make them last. Every day I realize how fleeting the life is, and how much of it we spend wasting it.

The process goes something like this: You know things are bad, and that you need to fix them. To fix them, you need to start with changing your mindset. Changing your mindset is difficult, so you begin to look for change in other ways — whether it be trying to look for a new job, or moving to a new place, or in so many other ways. (The hideous part of looking for changing in other ways is that you are deferring more pain and anxiety for later, rather than changing your mindset and taking care of things now.) After you have made the change, things seem okay for a while, great even. After a while, things get bad again and you replace them with what provides peace in the short-term. The cycle continues over and over again.

To live a life filled with meaning, we need to:

1. Change our mindset
2. Make major changes to our life, one step at a time
3. Learn to recognize the meaning(Sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle) that results from doing so
4. Talk more about what gives our life meaning

I find changing my mindset to be the most difficult. Most of us do point 2 in isolation, thinking that alone would make everything fall into place magically somehow. But that seldom happens. I am currently in the process of researching about the ways in which we can change our mindset, and I will write about it in a subsequent post.

Meaning is an overused word, and it doesn’t have to necessarily sound cheesy. What gives your life meaning? is a question asked over and over again. Most of us think that’s something to be just talked vaguely about, when actually that’s pretty much there is to life. If we are sincere about what gives our lives meaning and work sincerely toward it, we will be much happier, much more content. Granted we might earn a little less than if we continued doing what we were doing, we will wake up every day looking forward to the day. And that’s a pretty powerful feeling to have.

When I was 20, I wanted to not exist anymore. The same happened when I was 21, 22, and that feeling has continued to return pretty often ever since. In the moment when I feel like not existing, I put on my headphones, play a song that I love at full volume, and try to not think about things. I think in some ways, I am allowing my heart to do all the talking and in those moments, I try to clutch at whatever shred of meaning I can find, or I have found. I find a reason to exist, and I then continue with the struggle.