Five Ways to Find Meaning In Your Life
First published on November 17, 2021
I’ve told before the slightly amazing experience I had at the Rebel Wisdom Festival in 2019, when something shifted in the room as a man called Jordan Hall answered a question that was something like ‘Given the existential threats facing humanity, what can we do?’ For me, as he answered (read more about what he said here) the quality of the air in the room almost changed. Not only because it spoke to me and my work, but because in sharing that he showed that he thought in a different way to almost anyone else I had heard speak. And because it felt like he spoke the truth.
And, over the course of the morning, today, knowing I would be writing an article, asking myself ‘What wants to be written today?’, Jordan Hall came back into my mind. In an interview on the TRIGGERnometry podcast (slightly strange because the interviewers are used to interviewing very smart ‘normal thinkers’ about the culture wars, and Hall is not a normal thinker), he gave an answer to a question that has stayed with me since. I remember, in fact, exactly where I was when he gave it, walking along the River Thames, just by Albert Bridge, with my daughter asleep in the carrier on my chest. It had that same quality as his answer at the festival: the quality of the air changing, the sense that something important was being said.
I don’t even remember the question, but the answer was something like this: we have fallen out of touch with the things that give us meaning. Those are: God, nature, family, community and developing our selves. (The beauty/problem of the 12-minute writing practice is that I don’t have time to check his exact words, the last of the five in particular – so apologies Jordan if you read this!)
Pause on those five for a second. God. Nature. Family. Community. Developing our selves, growing as people, transforming into something new. Hall, I think off the cuff, although he didn’t say that, called this the five-fingered fist of meaning (or something like that).
It strikes me that each of those – or, at least, the first four – have had havoc wreaked with them over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, for many of us at least. And, yet, some of us have also been able to take steps towards and find, more closely, some of these.
God. We live in a society, in the UK, where for many of us religion and spirituality are divorced almost completely from day-to-day life. If they play a part at all. Faith is not fashionable. I have reflected before of my envy of those of my friends with faith, the trust and peace and meaning it brings. And I have reflected before that the problem when you remove God from your way of making meaning is that other things tap in instead: politics, tribalism, sport, even strange things like the NHS or the climate emergency, take on a religious quality. Not always for the best. In some ways, my personal journey over the last year or two has been about how to relate to God, and what that means to me.
Nature. Here, at least, in the pandemic, most of us have fallen back on Nature. Our parks are busier, people have discovered new walks near their house. The beaches and national parks were almost too busy at times. And yet those of us in the city, with it sucking at our souls, have found nature hard to come by. And I, at least, have felt the challenge of that.
Family. So many of us have been separated from our loved ones over the last 18 months, so much more than normal. If I had any doubt about whether family should be on this list, the birth of my daughter and the almost instant recovery of my mental health after months of languishing on the border of depression put that to rest. Someone I know complained to me about the deathly pandemic cycle of sleep-work-children-Netflix-sleep-work-children-Netflix. I said: imagine how deathly that would be without the children.
Community. Here, too, in a society without much community of note, the pandemic has connected us more. But not enough. To local volunteer groups. Even just to the sense, in lockdown, that the people walking near our home live near our home. That we are connected to them. But many of us live outside of communities. Many of us our isolated from them.
And ourselves, our selves. Meaning can come here. Meaning can come from growth. We always have this within us. Meaning can come from facing the struggles, from seeing ourselves, from setting ourselves the intentions of who we would like to be and then doing what we need to do to shift towards it. Meaning can come from the deep discovery of who we really are.
And so, when the languishing sets in, when the meaning is absent. Look for meaning, perhaps, in one of the five-fingers on the first of meaning.