The Search for Meaning. Hint: It’s not Something we Find

Among the books on my shelves are several whose titles include the word “meaning.” Viktor Frankl’s important Man’s Search for Meaning is one, and if he can offer hope after surviving a Nazi concentration camp, I’m glad to absorb his advice. Some philosophers claim that life has no inherent meaning and we each have to find our own. This sounds reasonable enough, since I have derived meaning through having a purpose, whether from my work, volunteering, or the art that I pursue. But these involve producing something. Can there be meaning without a product?

A recent post by Maria Popova in her daily The Marginalian caught my eye and deepened my thoughts on this subject. “The transmutation of despair into love,” she writes, “is what we call meaning.” Yes, I thought, as I reread the paragraph. It was about a change of heart, not a piece of art.

Why do we need to find meaning in our lives when other species don’t appear to? Although we keep finding out more about the intelligence, emotions and other “human-like” attributes of other animals, they have so far left no messages scratched into trees or sand asking “Who am I? Why am I here?” Maybe we shouldn’t be spending so much time wondering about that either. Maybe figuring out how to create love from despair is a meatier pursuit.

When I am outside, in addition to the natural beauty and solace I find in the wilds, I am also in my physical body absorbing the experience through my senses. I’m focused on the immediate, like where my next step is going to land, the sounds around me, the air temperature and the feel of sun on my jacket on a chilly day; mostly things that are not conscious, except for watching out for chiseler holes or rocks I could trip over.

What I’m not thinking about are reasons for despair: my battles with search engines, websites and passwords; the general state of human affairs (desperate, as usual); my to-do list and looming deadlines; or the fact that my favorite veterinarian’s office is closing in a couple of weeks.

Our brains are filled with anxiety-producing facts, and on top of them we add worry, which doesn’t do much to alter the facts. When do we have time to think about and create meaning?

We build in that time. Meditators meditate. It’s a highly recommended practice, one that many of us try but find it too hard to sit still for 15 minutes doing nothing. There are other ways to focus on what matters, of course. Writers scribble, artists sketch, woodworkers get that chair spindle just right, nurses watch a patient’s changing blood pressure. In so doing, we are paying attention to one important thing in the here and now.

Engaging in an activity that demands focus is one way to banish anxiety, at least for as long as we are doing it. What makes our worries recede in a more satisfying way is to get out of the house and go for a walk. Walking is such an innate act for us bipeds that unless the terrain is steep and rough, we don’t have to concentrate on it. Our minds are free to work out some puzzle, or else just let go of everything for a little while.

Even when I’m walking with a purpose, wanting to sort out some minor dilemma or compose a haiku in my head, I soon find myself abandoning thoughts in favor of paying attention to what is around me. I am no longer an individual person existing inside my head, but part of a larger whole that includes trees and birds and clouds. Feeling part of the place opens me up and allows me to relax in what I can only call a spiritual way.

My husband died nearly four years ago, and yesterday was his birthday. All kinds of thoughts, images and memories crowded my head, but what stayed with me after an hour’s ramble in the foothills was a sense of broader perspective. Sorrow and nostalgia didn’t vanish but took their place in a much larger context. I came home refreshed by having walked among bare aspens with views to the mountains carving clear air, their shadows deeply incised in canyons.

What you experience outside doesn’t have to be as large as a range of mountains to allow joy to settle in. My delight was sparked by what I found on the shaded side of a boulder where a patch of last week’s snow remained. The snow was covered by tracks of a vole that must have run up and down it a half-dozen times. Maybe there were seeds stashed in a crevice, but I didn’t think about why the tracks were there, only that they were. It looked like the vole had been having fun, running up the snowfield to summit at the crest of the boulder before racing back down. As a skier, I could relate to that.

I don’t deny that threatening clouds loom over human culture these days, and not only in our own part of the world. I do admit that enjoying a vole’s track is a temporary diversion. But I also know that it left me with more hope and optimism than I had when I started on my walk.

Another thing that gives me a bit of hope is to zoom way out in my imagination, the way we do when standing under a night sky full of stars. That feeling of personal insignificance is comforting.

After the recent election, many of us are feeling a mix of emotions, among them fear. Those who care about the environment, public land and other creatures may be feeling a touch of despair. It’s something what washes over me daily.

I comfort myself knowing this planet has been through at least five mass extinction events (not counting the current one), which wiped out the vast majority of species. Yet life came booming back, more diverse than ever before. Time, like space, is enormous beyond our ability to comprehend, and it is full of potential even when the world we thought we knew is crumbling. Death begets life, and what a miracle that is.

Everything changes, everything passes. The boulder that the vole climbed was once sea floor ooze, and now it’s perched on a slope at 7,000 feet, covered with so many lichens that one could hardly find a patch of the rock’s actual surface. The boulder is subject to rain and wind and freeze-thaw cycles, and will someday crumble into pieces and roll down the hill into the creek below. Water will wear the pieces into cobbles, then sand, then flakes of silt to be carried downstream and buried again. If they’re buried long enough, those bits will become new rock.

This morning I got up and looked out the window to see the trees in my backyard, planted as saplings and now creating a forest. All I felt was gratitude for the slice of space-time that I inhabit. For those few moments I wasn’t worried about what could happen next. What a relief it was, to quit worrying about things I can’t change.

This isn’t meant to be happy talk about carrying on in the face of trouble. A lot of things are very likely to change in frightening ways and I can’t say I’m happy about it. But I consider the act of conjuring love from despair more than a mere definition of meaning—it’s a call to action. In despair, we give up, maybe even hide ourselves away. It’s tempting, I know. But in love, there is nothing we won’t do to protect our beloved.

As I turned away from the window this morning to begin my day, I resolved to focus on ways I can contribute to the work of standing up for all that I love, however small my efforts. I’m like a flake of silt that was once part of a boulder, and with enough others of my kind, we will become stone once again.