I have a dream that has taken shape over the last three years: to teach a class, to conduct a workshop, on achieving meaning in life.
What do I mean by “The Meaning of Life”? What do any of us mean? For most of my life, certainly since I was a teenager and began questioning things—my parents and authority in general, what I was being taught in school, the principles of the Catholic church—I have imagined that there was some sort of underlying meaning to the universe, a purpose really. There was something, I imagined, that if I came to understand it would change my life.
In college, towards the end of my baccalaureate years, I came upon the Tao te Ching. It would be unsurprising if I, being only 22 years old, didn’t misinterpret what Lao Tzu was suggesting (and at any rate, I would go on to wrestle with its ideas for decades), but what I saw in it was this: there is a fundamental order to the world, and our task is to align ourselves with it. This is, of course, easier said than done.
But this is not necessarily what I pursued. Instead, slowly at first, I began to live an ideal that went like this: if I can change my circumstances, I can change my life. My environment needs to be the right one, I thought—so I would move around. After college, I left upstate New York, where I’d grown up, and moved west to Oregon. I lived in Eugene, then Bend, then Portland. There must be greener grass, I told myself. Many good things happened in those years, for certain. And yet you may see the trap I fell into.
My friend who studies Buddhism put it best: I imagined, he said, that I could, by willpower alone, make a nirvana out of samsara. This, naturally, is not the point of Buddhism or its practice. It’s entirely wrongheaded.
A major understanding came when I began to realize that there is no universal meaning of life. There’s not one answer to which we all must conform. There are principles we live by, certainly—justice, equality, fairness, creativity, and perhaps most of all, kindness—and those principles are, so far as I know, universal. But meaning is entirely individualistic; that is, the meaning of life is the meaning of my life, of your life. It is how we ourselves, each in our own reality, actualize these universal principles in practice. We are not all the same—some of us are engineers, parents, artists, managers. Why should our meaning be precisely the same?
Around the time I conceived of creating a kind of workshop to help people achieve this meaning—and I had two friends whom I met for coffee each week whom I discussed these ideas with—the pandemic began. The lockdown followed and, within a month of that, I was laid off from my job. I quite suddenly found myself applying for unemployment insurance, scraping together any emergency funds I could. It took a year and a half until I secured some regular work. Not long after that, my mother died.
Like many, I found my mind spinning. I questioned my choices in the past, the actions and behaviors I judged relentlessly that left me divorced, a single parent, and now unemployed. I constantly fretted over the future, over money and health care, over whether or not I would keep my house, which I had mortgaged with money my father had left me when he died a little over five years before.
In short, I ruminated.
What is rumination? A common definition is the act of regurgitating food and rechewing it. The psychological definition is what happens when one repetitively and obsessively goes over and over the causes of distress, chewing and chewing on the same thought. Rumination is thinking in its most negative form. In some ways—my Buddhist friend made this clear to me—this is what the mind does. It is an evolutionary maladjustment: the mind seeks the causes of troubles so as to avoid them in the future. In the case of stumbling upon a predator in a certain place, this would be enormously helpful. But in a complicated world, rumination likewise gets complicated. The worlds of dating, of careers, of relationships, or of parenting are not simple. We ask ourselves over and over, what did I do wrong? Rumination is an underlying factor of clinical depression.
Buddhist thinking points out that the “mind stream” is always running. The brain secretes thoughts the way the stomach secretes acids, my friend told me, quoting a Buddhist saying—or the way the heart beats or the lungs fill. It is what the brain does. The key, though, is to see that rumination becomes problematic when we fix our attention on that very thought-stream. The way out of rumination, in fact, is to shift one’s attention. To what?
The answer—and herein lies the “meaning of life”—is simple: shift it to any task. It could be washing dishes, working on a car, or building a class around the meaning of life. This is essentially the task of what we think of as “mindfulness.” However, there are ways to set the stakes high. Art, it turns out, is one way to escape the hell of rumination. As Lucifer intones in Milton’s Paradise Lost,
“Me miserable! which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; / And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep / Still threatening to devour me opens wide, / To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.”
Perhaps you’ve been there. I have.
There is, in fact, a kind of relief. For me it begins, as I would come to learn, with the incredible story of Viktor Frankl. It continues with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of “Flow,” which many of us know about but perhaps not to its full psychological significance. And for me, it ends with the task I have chosen: art, both writing and photography. Parenting is another task I focus on, cooking, yard work…there are many ways to achieve flow. Art is not the only way, but it is one I might use to illustrate how one achieves what Frankl refers to as transcendence. Especially as I prepare to leave for my two-month photography residency.
I will continue this idea in the next blog tomorrow, where I will outline the basics of the transcendental goal that allows one to achieve meaning in their lives—and in the lives of others.