Search for Meaning
I see meaning in the lives of many people around me, past and present. The greats – Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, James Dean – were the most meaningful of all, and I do anything I can to storm the gates of Mount Olympus where they sit. But what if I never join their sacred company? What if I am (the horror) ordinary; just one of seven billion undifferentiated people caught up in a cultural current? Is there meaning here?
Philosophically, I can make the argument and I know people who live it well: family and friends whose ordinary love in the face of uncertainty, pain, and mortality is nothing short of extraordinary. There is nobility in the simple life, the Frog and Toad life. “Living well is the best revenge. Come to think of it, just living will do,” Bono said. Easy for him to say. Bono has lived better than any of us and his revenge is sweeter. But to me, insignificance and anonymity feel a long way from meaning.
I see meaning in the Bohemian ideals – freedom, beauty, truth, and love – and those who pursue these ideals to the hilt.
While driving Highway 1 in California, I saw van lifers – modern day gypsies who walked away from a worn out American Dream. They abandoned the corporate and social ladder for the open road. Fishpeople, beach bums, and anchor-outs. Christopher McCandless and Jack Kerouac. “I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot,” wrote Jack London. These are people who gave their lives for freedom, and in their light we all look like cowards.
I see meaning in the neon punk princess climbing out of her neon punk Mini Cooper, matching shoe laces and racing stripes. A life devoted to aesthetic. There is something beautifully defiant about wearing this and driving that in our hostile world. A beauty pageant in a war zone. It’s a defiance that triumphs over even the bleakest nihilism. “It’s all so meaningless, we may as well be extraordinary.”*
There is meaning in Alana Champion who abstains from photo ops, interviews, and brand partnership deals. She doesn’t care for the status or perception that so many others chase. She’s the last of the Beat generation searching for the pulse of life itself. Wherever it’s happening, she is there, smoking cigarettes and writing poetry. “To make living itself an art, that is the goal.”**
My former pastor, Don Jennings, has spent his life loving people. My grandmother did the same. Instead of collapsing inward on her own pain, she used it as the common ground on which to empathize with and minister to hundreds of people. Dr. Jordan Peterson has devoted his life to studying and telling the truth, as did C.S. Lewis before him. I am in awe of these people. These are lives worth living; meaningful enough to rise above the bloody tragedy of the human experience.
The meaning I see in the lives of many disappears in the mundane, daily processes that comprise my life. Neither I nor my achievements are extraordinary. I don’t have freedom, beauty, truth, or love except in flashes. Mostly, I have a job to do, groceries to get, emails to answer, schedules to juggle, existential crises to endure.
I’m comparing my insides to someone else’s outsides and the envy, idolization, or discontentment that follows is never useful. I wonder how many of the people I admire feel the same way I do – they look at their lives and do not see meaning. Elvis believed he did nothing lasting. Christopher McCandless believed he was a failure. External circumstances and achievement never give us the meaning or fulfillment we think they will.
We all know how this article ends – I’ve labored over this theme long enough. How God is at work in us and through us in spite of us, doing what we may not see and probably don’t want for purposes higher than our own. How we can trust the process, and learn to see the meaning hidden in plain sight all around us. There are greater forces at play in the universe than our own incompetence and ignorance, and thank God for that. I hope one day I will stop writing about the themes I need to hear and start hearing them in the melody of life. I hope to find the peace and even the joy that I have a sneaking suspicion is lurking just beyond the struggle, the endless thought experiments, and the writing of many words.
Humans have an extraordinary capacity to find meaning anywhere if we look hard enough. Or nowhere if we don’t. May we be given eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to understand that there is meaning, even here.
J.
*Francis Bacon
**Henry Miller
March 7, 2023