Meanings.

The hunt for a meaning in life appears to me now to be without any meaning whatsoever. Can it be possible that those whom we look up to now, knew when they struggled through life that their existence had a definite purpose and meaning?  I doubt it. People rarely plan their lives out so meticulously as all that. There are of course people with passion and vision but even they would have had days when they wondered if they were on the right path or if they were wasting their lives on things that would turn out to be disappointing or not worthwhile.

The meaning of anyone’s life can possibly be seen in retrospect. That is when the choices that lead to the overall pattern emerge. There may be people who head arrow-like toward their destiny but even in the lives of those individuals there would have been unforeseen tragedies or occurrences that veered them off their path so that their course would not have always been true. It is the very humanness of our existence that makes the search for meaning both seductive and quite impossible. Unless of course we are thinking of it from a spiritual angle, in which case meaning is achieved through self-realization alone.

My husband and I have widely differing views on the ability of an individual to control all aspects of his or her life. S believes that the past is best left in the past and that the focus has to be on the future. I believe that the past never truly stays in the past but influences our moves towards the future and also influences our present. I agree that letting the present be marred by the worries of the past is undesirable but how is it possible to remove all memories of pain ? Does not pain shape you into making decisions differently? Isn’t every individual a sum of past actions and future hopes? How possible is it to live completely in the present when it very quickly ends up being the past?

The burdens of the past are best left behind but the experiences need to stay with you so that you make better choices. In that sense, no one’s past is ever completely left behind. Men, however appear to be able to box their memories selectively. They can shut away painful ones and act as though they never happened. They can then go about and try entirely new things. That is perhaps why S and I do not agree on the value of the past in our present day existence.

The hunt for meaning is an on-going one for me. It will forever be on-going I suspect. It is hard to believe that I exist only because I have to or that the very act of living from day to day is sufficient to create a worthwhile life. But that is exactly what the meaning of life probably will end up being – an anti-climax that states that living each day and doing the task immediately before you is what you have been meant to do all along. That fame and fulfilment are merely buzzwords. That what matters is doing your duty to the best of your ability. That does not actually sound very exciting. But then perhaps the meaning of life is far more mundane than I expected. Maybe the answer has been around a lot longer than the question itself.