Definitions of “Meaning of Life”
As per Wikipedia
“…pertains to the significance of living or existence in general. Many other related questions include: ‘Why are we here?’, ‘What is life all about?’, or ‘What is the purpose of existence?’”
Note how wiki sticks to rephrasing the question.
Note the absence of an answer.
Note that after centuries, no, millennia, of discussion, debate, and rock-throwing, the human race remains as far from a common answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life” as when the question was first put.
I grew up in a Roman Catholic school where they reformatted the question of the meaning of life to, “Why did God make us?”
Here’s the answer I learned growing up:
“God made us to know, love, and serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him in the next.”
And we memorized the answer.
Okay. Easy enough to remember.
But easy to understand?
No, not exactly.
Not even if you are privy to years of Roman Catholic education that draws on a variety of canons of behavioral rules.
In their efforts to clarify the “God-made-us” answer, the teaching nuns pulled in the Hail Mary, the Ten Commandments, the sacraments, the Our Father, Roman Catholic tradition, the Old Testament, papal bulls, the New Testament, the Apostles Creed, papal encyclicals, and the corporal works of mercy that deal with helping with the bodily needs of other human beings.
Here’s that list.
1. Feed the hungry.
2. Give water to the thirsty.
3. Clothe the naked.
4. Shelter the homeless.
5. Visit the sick.
6. Visit the imprisoned, or ransom the captive.
7. Bury the dead.
And here’s its companion list, the spiritual works of mercy dealing with relieving spiritual suffering.
1. Instruct the ignorant.
2. Counsel the doubtful.
3. Admonish the sinners.
4. Bear patiently those who wrong us.
5. Forgive offenses.
6. Comfort the afflicted.
7. Pray for the living and the dead.
While these exhortations have validity as behavioral checklists they add little to clarify the “God made us” answer.
So the quest continues unsatisfied.
Let it.
Joining in these fruitless, endless debates will only sap our own philosophic energies; will turn us into John Lennon’s Nowhere Man:
He's a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land,
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.
Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
Isn’t he a bit like you and me?
Paul Gauguin’s questions were more on point when he titled his monumental painting hanging in Boston’s MFA, “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”
We know where we were born and where we were raised.
We know we’re human beings.
We know the direction we’ve set our life towards and can, to a degree, predict where we are going.
Easy questions. We just need fill in the blanks.
Too bad that M. Gauguin fancied himself a mystical person and intended no such banal interpretation of his questions.
Well, Phooey! To him, too.
Now a twist.
While we acknowledge the absence of a succinct resolution of the meaning-of-life conundrum, we reject the traditional existential conclusion that we live in a meaningless or absurd world.
As we reject Thomas Hobbes’ characterization of life as “solitary, poor, brutish, nasty, and short.”
As we reject any skepticism, confusion, uncertainty, perplexity, or doubt that life has meaning.
It most certainly does.
Searching for the meaning of life is a red herring.
Because searching outside ourselves is not the way to find it.
In fact, it is a complete waste of time.
Especially with the answer hiding in plain sight.
Masquerading as our behavior.
That’s right.
Our behavior is the wellspring from which meaning flows into our lives; the fountainhead of spirituality.
I see a woman with a stroller readying to navigate a down staircase.
I step over and lift the stroller’s front wheels.
Careful with the stroller, the caregiver and I descend the staircase.
That seemingly throwaway reaction actually runs quite deep.
I mustn’t slough it off as evanescent random kindness.
That spontaneous response spiritually enriched my life.
Our actions are amalgams of our psychological profile and our values and beliefs.
We define values as what we hold desirable or correct.
We define beliefs as what we hold as true.
Our psychological profile influences how we see reality: what we see is NEVER all there is.
Our observations are distorted by personal issues like narcissism, myopia, prejudice and acceptance, anxiety and exhilaration, physical condition, love and hate, and the environment; and by our intelligence, creativity, imagination, desire to give back, cultural awareness, analytic capabilities.
A base need for food and shelter influences our psychological profile; as do a sociological need to belong and an elevated drive for beauty and ecstasy.
Our responses to events are based on how we see them, not as they actually occur.
Throughout our lives we codify an ever-evolving personal set of values and beliefs.
We use this code as our benchmark against which to compare the rightness or wrongness of our responses to people or situations.
Some of our code’s sources date back three billion years.
Examples are genetics – biological and psychological; natural instincts, like self-preservation and propagation of the species.
And the Natural Law that reason discloses to us as underlying all human behavior.
We absorb things our parents teach us.
We add in things we learn from close friends, television, and the social media.
We merge the entire belief systems and values of outside organizations, like schools, the military, and organized religions.
Sometimes we’re victims of the brainwashing of college professors preying on young and eager minds; or governments, spinning the truth to suit; or mentors, extracting adulation for smoothing the path to advancement in the material world. We subconsciously, perhaps, add even these alien sources to our code.
Some of our code sources derive from our own past responses to moment-to-moment situations, like helping someone with a stroller descend a staircase.
Our feelings, as we walk away from such moments or think about them later, get absorbed into our code and, in turn, influence responses that follow.
Judging our behavior against what we expect of ourselves requires reflection.
Reflecting on whether our actions conform to what we deem desirable and correct produces an existential mindset, an assertion of our commitment to live spiritually-directed lives.
And spiritually-directed living makes us impervious to the unimportant.
So reflection dooms our dinner party to success even if the roast turkey turns out a tad dry, or the conversation less than amiable.
Reflection impacts our superordinate decisions.
Never do we need reflection more than when we ponder sublime changes in our lives.
Getting married, choosing a college, choosing that first job, uprooting ourselves from an eastern city to go West and claim that government promised "Forty acres and a mule" number among such decisions.
So important these, besides reflection, we study the subject, seek professional counseling, share the experiences of peers, and get input from close family and friends.
Reflection impacts corollaries, the consequent requirements of superordinate decisions.
Every superordinate decision comes with a host of related obligations that we accept as part of the package.
So pioneers deciding to go west to root a family in the great unknown accepted farming and cooking as corollary to their chosen way of life.
Students enrolling in college accept that they will be studying texts, writing papers, producing films.
But the devil is in the details.
Details are the individual, indivisible, line-item components of the corollaries.
And it's here we clearly see the importance of reflection on our daily lives because existential mindset includes dedication to craft.
Learning the job well,
Taking the time to do each assignment properly.
using the right tools if only for the aesthetics of it.
Taking pleasure from the doing.
The more dedicated we are to the work we do the richer our spiritual fulfillment.
“Read 50 pages of Anna Karenina for tomorrow’s class,” the teacher says. The students’ details.
“May I have a very hot cup of coffee?” the customer asks. The wait-staff's details.
The cook's details: “I’ll make my own stock for the recipe.”
The Shakers' dedication to doing everything exquisitely without regard to time serves as a brilliant example of bringing meaning to our lives.
Francis of Assisi said this:
He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”
The purpose of this blog is to unveil the artist in each of us.
Be well.
Be good.
I love you.
Dom Capossela
dom@existentialautotrip.com