A question that comes up fairly often is: what makes your life meaningful? It is one of the deep questions of life, but feels trite when asked outside of a deep context, turning a worthwhile question into an invitation for performative answers or a nifty sound bite, any chance of gaining significant insight lost before it even started.
But even if you were to seriously ponder what gives your life meaning, it wouldn’t take long after spewing out conventional and conditioned phrases that your brain runs out. Stick with it, and you will likely feel (as have I) a paralyzing effect, the pressure to declare nothing less than the most grandiose intentions, or else lose all hope of ever leading a worthy, well-lived life.
Yet again, the journey to significant inner knowledge stalls. Add in the demands of daily life or a distraction, and the trail stops dead cold.
Naturally, your next thought is, who has the time to look for significance and meaning? I’m busy. So you go back to your day, perhaps feeling a bit let down that you didn’t harbor well-defined grand ambitions after all, or if you did, wondering if were they grand enough for your life to feel truly meaningful.
So where do we go from here?
According to author Oliver Burkeman, “the average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But this isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible: the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be.”
Meaning, we don’t have to constantly aim to be extraordinary as the only way to do justice to (or feel worthy of) the short time we are allotted, because while we may certainly achieve extraordinary things, we cannot expect to hope that our life will someday be only that and then we can finally be who we really are, and start living like we’re supposed to, and then our life will be significant and meaningful. Real life—life as it really is—will always fall short of that fantasy, always feel less.
But if we cut through the illusion, accept reality, and agree to live life on its own terms, that can be the most meaningful way to live each day. We can let go of the impossible and choose—with extraordinary significance—to do what’s possible instead. And quite possibly, in doing many of the everyday things, we are doing so already.
Photo by James Qualtrough on Unsplash
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