Essay 15 - How to Cultivate Meaning

There are many questions that are very easy to ask but way more difficult to answer. “How do I make friends?” “How do I get healthy?” “How do I become educated?” “How can I make a difference in the world?” And so on. “How do I find enduring meaning in my life?”, is a question like that. Most of these questions have toss off answers that can get you started but are wholly inadequate unless you are willing to learn along the way. Sometimes you learn a whole lot. Sometimes the learning is frustrating, disappointing, or painful. The answer to “How do I make friends?” is “You have to go out and meet people”. Well, that is a start but not much of one. The answer to the question “How do I find enduring meaning in my life?” is “You have to cultivate it”. That does point you in the right direction but is wholly inadequate to take you all the way.

First you must resolve to be persistent. Enduring meaning is not something you can pick up at the dollar store or on the way home from work. Nor is it something you can put on your to do list and scratch it off that evening. It will take some time. So be patient and persistent.

Second, be prepared to explore. You need to find something to cultivate. Going back to experiences – I never learned to appreciate wine, but I love good scotch. If I had continued to plug away at wine, I would still be disappointed. There are many, many candidates for cultivating meaning, some examples of which we will consider in the following essays. But finding the right ones may take time. And there are some heuristics that we will address as well. You need to organize your thoughts; organize your emotions; find patterns; and reflect on how meaningful these patterns may be. And that we will explore next. 

This essay is 329 words long and the audio is a little over 2 1/2 minutes.