Making Meaning

Isn’t our goal to reduce our experience of anxiety, not increase it? If dark tunnels make us anxious, are we really obliged to explore them?

Our goal is not to reduce our experience of anxiety: our goal is to live authentically. In order to live authentically, we must consciously and completely embrace anxiety.

We must invite anxiety. Our system says that this is irrational but our heart knows that it is exactly right.

If we intend to make meaning by writing a great novel, we can’t also hope to flee from the experience of anxiety. If we intend to hunt down a life-saving herb in a mosquito-infested jungle, we can’t also hope to flee from the experience of anxiety.

If we intend to stand up for a principle that our whole town rejects, we can’t also hope to flee from the experience of anxiety.

In order to accomplish these meaning-making tasks, we are obliged to say, “Okay, anxiety. Bring it on!”

We tend to lose our taste for roller coasters the older we get. At fourteen we can’t wait to get on the Wild Monkey or the Ultimate Plunge. At forty, we can wait. Likewise, our taste for anxiety does not increase. We mind our grandchildren with an even more watchful eye than we minded our children, we move our money to safer investments, we take fewer risks and invite fewer heart palpitations.

This is the natural way. And still, in order to live authentically, we must risk anxiety, brave anxiety, embrace anxiety, and invite anxiety every single day.

For a meaning-maker, as much as he might wish for one, there is no retirement from anxiety.

What is so soothing about seeking meaning, as opposed to making meaning, is that you can’t make a mistake—by definition.

You can go off to India for a year, study with a yogi who turns out to be a fraud, get dysentery, and come home poorer and no wiser, and still you get to call your year excellent, because, although you didn’t find any answers, you were a good, honorable seeker.

Nothing is a mistake to a seeker—not banding with bigots, not turning your child over to a guru, not chanting things you do not believe—because every such sin gets washed away in the warm water of innocence in which the seeker fancies himself bathing.

A meaning-maker is not so self-servingly innocent. He knows that the thing he is about to embark on may prove a mistake: he owns up to that possibility. He recognizes that he does not need to locate principles and values, that he has them already, and that if he violates them he is making a mistake by his own lights.

He doesn’t get to say “I didn’t know,” “I didn’t understand,” and “I was just following.” He knows better than that and is more truthful than that.

It is not only all right to invite in the possibility of making mistakes, it is the honorable thing to do. Fearing mistakes is a sure road to smallness.

To not make a large meaning investment in fighting some injustice because you fear that your time may be wasted, that others may fail you, that others may turn on you, or that it may prove some other sort of “mistake,” is to end up not fighting that injustice and not making meaning.

You avoided the “mistake”—but at what cost? Better to accept that life comes with countless missteps, wrong turns, and dead ends. Our desire to don the mantle of meaning-maker should not be extinguished because we fear pratfalls.

When we think about the sort of task that meaning-making is, we conclude—rightly—that our meanings are bound to change as we decide to invest meaning here, remove meaning there, and carefully monitor our meaning investments.

How unsettling to be for a war one day and against it the next, as our subjective sense of the war’s meaning changes, or against it one day and for it the next.

We know in our bones that these are among the worst sorts of feelings, having our sense of the world turned completely upside down overnight. We do not want this—which is why people adopt overarching positions, like always being for their country’s war or always being against their country’s war, so that they can avoid having their meaning equilibrium disturbed.

If you fear that meaning will never be settled if you agree to don the mantle of meaning-maker, you are exactly right. You will have opened yourself up to some of the worst feelings imaginable, including feelings of foolishness and despair.

But what you lose in safety, you gain in righteousness. You can live a settled life, existentially speaking, but only at the cost of your authenticity and integrity. It is really much better, albeit more dangerous, to accept that meaning will never be settled, that meaning is always at risk, that meaning is a problem and a challenge and not a foregone conclusion.

Agreeing to this is like agreeing to live in a place like Los Angeles or San Francisco, where small earthquakes occur regularly and the big one is a real threat. It is to agree to earthquakes.

There is no reason why you should do this with a smile and no reason why you feel sanguine about surviving all this tumult. It is simply the right course, as to settle meaning for all time is to kill the self.

10. Meaning-making is as artificial and subjective an idea as any other idea about meaning

It is quite correct to argue that meaning-making is just an idea and no more valid, true, verifiable, or interesting than other ways of construing life. Maybe there are seventy-five gods, all squabbling, and our best bet is to try to appease them.

Maybe greed, ambition, and satisfaction are the answers and the goals of life are to make millions and to sleep with lots of sexy partners.

There is no lack of constructions: in fact, there are billions, one for each person. That is exactly the point.

The philosophical tradition known alternately as structuralism and postmodernism has explored this territory with great energy and perversely difficult language.

In one of its less obscure passages, the French structuralist Jean Baudrillard opined, “Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.”

This is Baudrillard’s way of saying that, since the contemporary person has “seen through” the idea of absolute meaning, he is left with billions of meanings, all equally fragile, all equally subjective, all equally fugitive.

That is true. To say that meaning-making is artificial and subjective is only to say that whatever you choose to believe has the built-in flaw of not being “the absolute truth.”

You can’t get around this problem, except by asserting that there is absolute truth. Therefore it is no greater risk to nominate yourself as the sole arbiter of meaning than to take any other position with respect to meaning.

That meaning-making is an arbitrary way of naming your life’s path amounts to no objection at all and is entirely met in the following way: “Yes, that’s right.”

Throughout human history a majority of people have believed in some sort of divine presence. Many people today still ardently believe in a concept of the divine.

Even if you do not want to abandon your religious or spiritual beliefs, there is still ample reason for you to decide to create your own meaning.

Teachers in each of great traditions have argued that personal meaning-making in fact demonstrates a believer’s genuine, heartfelt desire to be involved in the world and to take God and life’s mysteries seriously.

As the presence of God is a matter of faith and faith provides a background coloration but nothing as simple as a blueprint to follow, you must take it upon yourself to make the meaning in your life.

In the Catholic tradition, for instance, Saint Augustine asks believers to don the mantle of meaning-maker in the following passage: Pray as though everything depended on God.

Work as though everything depended on you. St. Augustine demands that you actively participate in your life as a dedicated meaning-maker. Not only must you do the work of life and not shirk doing that work, you must figure out what that work is.

Even if God has a plan for you, you are not privy to that plan, and so you must operate for all intents and purposes as if you are constructing the plan of your life, in the hope that God’s hand is guiding your personal meaning-making. If you wait for whispers and signs, you may be getting that whisper and that sign from below and not from above.

Better to think through where you want to be good, productive, and righteous and invest your meaning there, trusting that God has placed his hand on your shoulder as you made your own choices.

In the Islamic tradition, it is written in the Koran: “God does not compel a soul To do what is beyond its capacity: It gets what it has earned, And is responsible for what it deserves.”

This excerpt from the Koran is relevant to our discussion because it reiterates in no uncertain terms that a believer must take responsibility for his actions. You cannot use a divine presence as an excuse or a scapegoat: you earn your righteousness and must think through, and then take responsibility for, your meaning choices.

It also addresses the objection that meaning-making is too much work. The Koran articulates great faith in the individual, assuring each one of us that we are capable of doing the work that our meaning intentions lay out for us.

In the Hindu tradition, widely held to be the most pluralistic of the major world religions, the Hindu Saint Ramakrishna explained, “Let each man follow his own path. If he sincerely and ardently wishes to know God, peace be unto him! He will surely reach Him.”

Ramakrishna, a teacher believed to have attained Enlightenment, announces with no hedging that there is no external power who is making decisions about what is the “right thing” to dedicate yourself to and no single way to make meaning.

Any activity can become meaningful to you when you decide that it should be so—and will take you in the direction you hope to go, that of meaning and righteousness.

To the lingering question always posed to existentialists, “Well, what if I decide to invest meaning in kicking puppies and eating babies?”, Ramakrishna is again clear: all will be well “if he sincerely and ardently wishes to know God.”

That is, all will be well if you sincerely and ardently put into play your best principles and highest moral sense. Creating pain and suffering in puppies and babies is not likely to strike you as positive and so you would foreswear those activities, because your moral sense is built right into you.

When you actively make meaning, you are tuning in to that moral sense. You do not have to worry that personal meaning-making will lead to your immorality, unless you fear that you are intrinsically immoral or inherently unable to tell a right thing from a wrong thing.

In the Buddhist tradition, the following passage from the Buddha (in the Kalama Sutta) is telling: “Yes, Kalamas, it is proper that you have doubt, that you have perplexity, for a doubt has arisen in a matter which is doubtful. Now, look you Kalamas, do not be led by reports, or tradition, or hearsay…. But, O Kalamas, when you know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome and wrong, and bad, then give them up... and when you know for yourselves that certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and follow them.”

The Buddha puts it simply and clearly: You must decide for yourself what you want to believe and where you want to invest meaning, and then you must commit to what you have chosen.

The work you choose will not be beyond you; as the excerpt from the Koran insisted, you have been given the capacity to sufficiently choose and commit. Nor should you be afraid of taking a wrong step, because, as Ramakrishna explained, any path has the potential to be the right path. Yes, you will be uncertain at times.

Yes, there will come moments when you need to reevaluate your individual meaning investments. But the existential threads in every tradition suggest that you have faith that what you choose for yourself is right for you and that you have the ability to accomplish the arduous work of personal meaning-making.

It may be scary, but this cycle of committing yourself and reevaluating your commitments is, according to every tradition, living!

If you want to don the mantle of meaning-maker but feel reluctant, one or more of these objections are likely at play—and maybe all ten of them. These are worrisome objections and it is perfectly understandable that you might find yourself unwilling to set off on a course of constant choosing, earthquake meaning shifts, unmitigated personal responsibility, and all the rest.

Still, you know your own truth. Isn’t this the path you always envisioned for yourself? If it is, you might try to meet these ten objections one by one, simply and forthrightly, in your own language.

• Meaning-making demands too much personal responsibility “No, being responsible appeals to me.”

• Meaning-making is too much work “Yes, it is a lot of work, but it is the right work and the only work.”

• Meaning-making involves too much choosing “It does! I don’t know if I am equal to all this choosing—I can only try.”

• Meaning-making increases core anxiety “It does and it doesn’t. In a way, it actually reduces it.”

• Meaning-making is an invitation to make big mistakes “Yes, it is, I suppose.”

• Meaning-making guarantees that meaning will never be settled “I always knew that about life.”

• Meaning-making is as artificial and subjective an idea as any other idea about meaning “Of course it is. And I embrace it as the way that makes the most sense to me.”

If I have met your objections—or if you have met your own objections—it is time to don the mantle of meaning-maker. You can do this by saying out loud, “I am a meaning maker, with all that entails.”

You might make your commitment more real by going out and purchasing some absurd garment, donning it, and feeling different.

You might make your commitment more real by walking up to people and, by way of introduction, announcing, “I make my meaning!”

Or you might do nothing fanciful: you might just stand up. That is the essential action and the essential position.

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Eric Maisel, Ph.D. holds Master's degrees in Creative Writing and Counseling, and a Doctorate in Counseling Psychology. He is a California licensed marriage and family therapist, a creativity coach and trainer of creativity coaches, and teaches through lectures, workshops, and teleseminars.

Dr. Maisel is widely regarded as America's foremost creativity coach and has taught thousands of creative and performing artists how to incorporate Ten Zen Second mindfulness techniques into their creativity practice. See his site EricMaisel.com for ebooks and more information on his work.

He is the author of more than thirty books - some titles at right:

Also see more articles by Eric Maisel.

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