The Meaning of Life
The Search For Oneself
Dr Raven Dolick M.s.D.
Mar 3, 2016
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2016 RavenStar Enchantments
What is the meaning of life?
It is perhaps the most often asked question or frequently debated notion known to mankind, yet it remains perhaps the greatest mystery whose answer still eludes us. Humans often feel the need to comprehend and understand our surroundings and the role we play within them and what the interaction means in our life as well as in the linear space of time. We often think back upon the events of our lives and we wonder what the meaning and importance of those events are and how they have acted to shape the outcome of our current and even future existence. We find a definite need to observe these seemingly isolated events and occurrences from our past and assign a value to them according to what manner and degree they have affected us, and this becomes important because if the events in our lives have no value, then our lives become a string of meaningless occurrences that happen in a random manner. So we question our actions and the things that we do and the things that we experience, and we formulate all these things as best as we can into a broad understanding of what our everyday lives mean to us, and then we make judgments of how happy or satisfying our direction in life seems to be.
Sometimes we do this without knowing that we do so, often day dreaming about a time in our lives that brings forth a sudden emotional sensation that jars our memory, much like how a certain smell can remind us of something long in our past by riveting us to that moment as we smell it. We link our daily lives and the present moment in time with our past and the events and times that we lived through, and we understand that these things of themselves have a certain meaning, yet as we do not know what the meaning of life really is, we cannot know exactly how the relationship of our everyday experiences and their meaning inter-weave with it.
For some people, the meaning of life is merely an unanswerable question that is meant to serve as an abstract concept to be endlessly debated, for if it has no answer, then no side of the debate can be wrong. The other aspect of this is if the question cannot be answered, we are not afraid to ask it because we cannot be expected to be responsible to discover the meaning to something that no one else can answer, so there is the safety of doing and risking nothing while waiting for someone else to discover it first. But even the most skeptical people understand that there is some meaning to life and somehow, our lives must have some effect within that broader framework. We ask ourselves what the meaning of life is, but what we really want to know is what the meaning of our individual existence is within the larger realm of life.
We all want to think that our lives mean something and that we bring some value to the greater scheme of things, but when we ask the question of what the meaning of life is, we find it difficult to grasp such an all-encompassing question because to answer it requires complexities that we never deal with in our everyday life. The tedious nature of modern life dulls our sense of such things because we concern ourselves with day to day survival and in finding ways just to get by, and this does not readily allow for the pursuit of the higher, less tangible things in life. The trick of it is that the actual pursuit of higher meaning is exactly what can salvage us from the traps of a mundane existence. It is almost as if the search to answer these questions is actually the purpose of asking them in the first place. We drive our own meaning and thus, our own destiny by seeking the truth behind it. It could be that there is not just one, but many answers to what the meaning of life is, and it is possible that there is no great secret at the end of the quest to find the meaning of life. It could be that searching for and creating meaning within our own lives is what it really is all about, and as each one of us does so, we add our own value into the greater framework of life.
The search for meaning in our own lives can become a self-fulfilling endeavor where we actually create the very thing that we search for. When we focus on finding meaning, we become aware of our surroundings and how they affect us and we affect them. We become aware of our interaction with others and we become cognizant of how we see and respond to the things within our world, and slowly, each day that we take this journey of self-discovery, we cannot help but create a little bit of meaning inside of us, and this process has a cumulative effect. The more our awareness grows, the more we comprehend the meaningfulness of our lives, and this leads us to search for and create more meaning within us. As the process continues and we build up the value of our lives, all sorts of things can and do change for us.
When we realize that the meaning of life is a destination created by the very search and discovery of meaning within our everyday existence, we also then realize new and wonderful things about ourselves and our interaction with that every day existence. We begin to look at events differently - with more awareness and patience - as we constantly strive to discover the essence of meaning in all things. We become more confident in ourselves and the relationships that we maintain because the quality of those interactions create a value both within us and those that we relate to, and this ever growing value transcends us and adds to the greater value and meaning of life. We become more focused and oriented toward the pursuit of quality experiences and meaningful interactions, and that desire and pursuit improves us. It makes us sense our own self-worth and the more we feel it and believe in it, the more we make it occur. It is then that life changes into a miraculous adventure filled with joy and wonder. When we make the shift to believing in never ending possibility and realizing our human potential, we make the commitment to ourselves to always try to achieve it. This then becomes the time when we finally realize that we are the true meaning of what life is.
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